Rewriting the ancient world. Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians in modern popular fiction 9789004340145, 9004340149, 9789004346383, 9004346384

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Rewriting the Ancient World

Metaforms Studies in the Reception of Classical Antiquity

Editors-in-Chief Almut-Barbara Renger (Freie Universität Berlin) Jon Solomon (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) John T. Hamilton (Harvard University) Editorial Board Kyriakos Demetriou (University of Cyprus) Constanze Güthenke (Oxford University) Miriam Leonard (University College London) Mira Seo (Yale-nus College)

VOLUME 10

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/srca

Rewriting the Ancient World Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians in Modern Popular Fiction

Edited by

Lisa Maurice

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: By Lisa Maurice The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017015579

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2212-9405 isbn 978-90-04-34014-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34638-3 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

“Cui dono lepidum novum libellum arida modo pumice expolitum?” tibi, amori, quem amo et semper amabo.

…

In Memory of Dr. Lana Schwebel z”l

∵

Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Contributors x Introduction: The Ancient World and Popular Fiction 1 Lisa Maurice

Part 1 Rewriting the Classics in Crime Fiction and Thrillers 1 From I, Claudius to Private Eyes: Rome and the Detective in Popular Fiction 19 Lisa Maurice 2 A Roman and a Foreigner: Lindsey Davis’s New Roman Detective Series 49 Anat Koplowitz-Breier 3 “An Open Account from the Past Always Needs to be Settled”: Chimaira (2001) / The Ancient Curse (2010) and Receiving the Past 67 Claudia Fratini

Part 2 Rewriting the Ancient World in a Modern Setting 4 Going Home: Xenophon’s Anabasis in Sol Yurick’s The Warriors (1965) 87 Eran Almagor 5 The Eagle and the Mockingjay: Reality Television as Roman Gladiator Culture 114 Dor Yaccobi 6 “Atalanta Just Married”: A Case Study in Greek Mythology-Based Fan Fiction 131 Amanda Potter

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Part 3 Rewriting Myths of Classical Literature 7

The Loves of Achilles: From Epic to Popular Fiction 153 Anne Sinha

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“Home Is Behind, The World Ahead”: Reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit as a Story of Xenia or Homeric Hospitality 174 Hamish Williams

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Cupid and Psyche: A Love Story (?) in Comics and Children’s Literature 198 Lily Glasner

Part 4 Rewriting Jews and Christians in the Ancient World 10

Sadducee and Pharisee in “The Antagonists” by E.K. Gann 221 Haim Perlmutter

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Emotion and Reception of the Ancient World in Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) 255 Emily Chow-Kambitsch

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Jewish Women Writing Historical Novels Based on Rabbinic Sources 277 Tal Ilan



Some Concluding Thoughts 298



Bibliography 303 Index of Subjects 331 Index of Ancient Sources 339

Acknowledgements This book first began as a result of a lack I perceived whereby the intersection between popular fiction and the ancient world had yet to be studied in any systematic way. From the casual mention of this inexplicable gap to Nick Lowe at a delightful conference in Liverpool, the idea for a conference ballooned quickly, encouraged at every stage by Nick and our other gracious keynote speakers, Edith Hall and Simon Goldhill. Entitled, “From I, Claudius to Private Eyes, the conference took place from 16-18 June 2014, at Bar-Ilan University. It could not have taken place, however, without the support of the Lechter Institute for Literary Research and the Lewis Family Foundation for International Conferences in the Humanities; Andrew Goldman of Tsemed, a bighearted and openhanded friend; and most of all Lilly and Philip Schwebel and Pam Swickley, who generously donated financial support matched only by gracious enthusiasm, in memory of their daughter and sister Lana Schwebel z”l, tragically taken from this world at far too young an age. This volume is as much tribute to her, and to her wonderful family, as it is a work of scholarship. On the more practical production side I must thank the anonymous reviewers of this volume, who did so much to improve it, and also the wonderful team at Brill, who worked so hard to produce this book, especially Tessel Jonquière whose patience and helpfulness make her such a pleasure to work with throughout. I am also inordinately grateful to the wonderful contributors to this book, who worked to deadlines, responded to emails, and remained co-operative to the end, making the venture an unusually enjoyable one to co-ordinate. Finally, as always my grateful thanks and love go to my family, whose support and enthusiasm know no bounds, and who kept life busy by insisting on marrying and producing offspring during the course of the development of this volume. My husband, sons, daughters, son-in-law and daughters-in-law, as well as my newly arrived grandson are what keep me sane during the often frenzied rush for deadlines! Thank you for everything.

List of Contributors Eran Almagor is the co-editor of Ancient Ethnography: New Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is the author of papers and chapters on the history of the Achaemenid Empire, its image in Greek literature (especially in Herodotus and Ctesias), the Lives of Plutarch and Greek Imperial writers (in particular Strabo, Josephus and Lucian. He is also interested in the reception of antiquity in modern popular culture Claudia Caia Julia Fratini is currently a Lecturer in the Department of English Studies, at the UNISA. Her interests range from Classical Reception in contemporary literature to creative expression in World War II, with specific focus on the Italian POW’s detained in South Africa. She is currently working towards a PhD which explores how the past is received and reworked within the narrative text in the noted Italian author and archaeologist Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s popular fiction. Claudia is also actively involved in the John Povey Centre in the Department of English, where she manages and teaches the Creative Writing programme. Amongst other things she dabbles in the poetic arts and describes herself as an experimenter of words and image. Emily Chow-Kambitsch completed a PhD in Classics at University College London in 2016. Her research to date focuses on dynamics of emotion in popular cultural representations of ancient Rome. She is currently preparing a manuscript for a monograph applying this approach to the narrative tradition of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and its theatre and film adaptations through 1931. Her other research interests include spatiality, material culture, and antiquity in the twenty-first century. Lily Glasner teaches courses in Children’s Literature and Medieval Literature at Bar Ilan University and at the Kibbutzim College of Education. Amongst her publications are: “Taking a Zebra to Vegas: Allegorical Reality in Percy Jackson & the Olympians” (2012); “Revisiting the Concepts of Child and Childhood in light of the Autobiographic Testimonies of Augustine and Guibert of Nogent” (2014, Hebrew); “But what does it all mean?”: Religious Reality as a Political Call in the Chronicles of Narnia” (2014); “Embracing Childish Perspective: Rutu Modan’s A Royal Banquet with the Queen” (2015).

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Tal Ilan is a professor of Jewish Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She was born and educated in Israel, where she also wrote her PhD on Jewish women in the Second Temple period. She is the author of the four-volume Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity (2002–2012) and of several books on Jewish women in Second Temple and Talmudic times, the last being Silencing the Queen (2006). She is the chief editor of the series A Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud of which five volumes have already been published. She is the author of the commentary on Tractate Taanit (2008). Anat Koplowitz-Breier is a lecturer in the Comparative Literature Department at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the subject of A Woman’s Charm in Le Morte D’Arthur—Two Models of Women in the Work of Sir Thomas Malory. Since then she has published several articles on medieval literature and on Modern poetry. Her research focuses nowadays on modern poetry (particularly German, English, and Hebrew), and the role of the Bible in such poetry. Another area of expertise is detective fiction. Lisa Maurice is a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Her research interests centre on the reception of the ancient world in modern popular culture and on Roman comedy, particularly the structure of Plautine plays. She is the author of The Teacher in Ancient Rome: The Magister and His World (Lexington 2013) as well as many articles on Plautus and on the reception of the ancient world in modern popular culture. She is the editor of The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Children’s Literature: Heroes and Eagles (Brill 2015) and co-editor of Beauty, Bravery, Blood and Glory: Ancient Virtues and Vices in Modern Popular Culture (Brill 2017). At present she is working on a monograph on the reception of Gods on screen, and, through an ERC-funded project entitled Our Mythical Childhood, an investigation of the ways in which classical mythology has been utilised in education. Haim Perlmutter received his doctorate in Jewish History from Bar Ilan University in 2012. His thesis was titled The Middle Class during the Mishnah Period: 70–250 C.E. He has since expanded his research to include socio-economic phenomena of the land of Israel under Roman Rule, as well as the reception of the Greek and Roman periods in the land of Israel. He lectures at Bar Ilan University, Ashkelon College and other academic institutions.

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Amanda Potter is a Research Fellow with the Open University, where she was awarded her PhD in 2014 for her thesis on viewer reception of Greek myth on television. She has published on viewer reactions to Greek myth in Xena: Warrior Princess, Charmed and Torchwood and fan fiction based on HBO’s Rome, Starz’ Spartacus and Doctor Who. Anne Sinha is associate professor of classics at the Université Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité. After working on the silver epic, and especially on the poetics of catalogues and lists, she is now working on classical Latin literature and on the reception of Antiquity in the modern world. Hamish Williams recently received his doctorate from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His work focuses on Ancient Greek epic, specifically on questions of homecoming and hospitality in Homer’s Odyssey. He is currently on an extended research stay at Leiden University. His future research plans centre on examining hospitality in works of popular fiction in the twentieth century, including fantasy, science fiction, western, and horror. His previous, pre-doctoral research work pertained to Horace’s Ars Poetica and the rhetoric of education in Latin. Dor Yaccobi is a graduate student at the department of film and television in Tel Aviv University. She is writing her thesis on The Dialectic Chronotype of the Coen Brothers, under the supervision of Professor Nitzan Ben Shaul. She has published an article on the role of the gladiator in the American epics from the 50’s. Her main field of research is contemporary Hollywood cinema.

Introduction: The Ancient World and Popular Fiction Lisa Maurice The ancient world has cast an influential shadow over history in almost every subsequent period, as throughout the ages different cultures have adapted and responded to Greece, Rome and earlier receptions of the classical cultures. The fascination that ancient society holds for later periods in the Western world is as noticeable of modern culture as it is of the Renaissance or Victorian Britain. It is as true of literature as it is of other media and genres; there is a vast body of work either set in, or interacting with, classical models, themes and societies. Works of popular fiction encompass a wide range of society, and the interaction between that area and the world of classics provides a useful window for examining the reception of Greece and Rome in society as a whole. This book looks at how and why the ancient world has been rewritten in modern popular fiction.

What is Popular Fiction?

The papers in this collection refer to popular fiction, rather than to works more commonly regarded as “high-brow” literature. Yet what is popular fiction? The difficulties inherent in defining the field are part of a wider problem of defining popular culture, a question whose complications Holt Parker has summarised and analysed in a recent paper.1 As a term, popular fiction specifically is notoriously difficult to define; as Glover and McCracken point out, it is a deceptively simple phrase, at once indispensable and commonplace, yet often left unsettlingly vague. It falls into the category of something that is hard to define, but one knows it when one sees it.2 So how may popular fiction be defined? Glover and McCracken quote the loosely defined idea that it is “those books that everyone reads”,3 written for a

1  Holt Parker, “Toward a Definition of Popular Culture”, History and Theory 50.2 (2011) 147–70. 2  David Glover and Scott McCracken, The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction (Cambridge Companions to Literature) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 1. 3  Ibid.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004346383_002

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mainstream, non-academic audience and read by large numbers of people.4 While terms such as “mainstream” and “large numbers of people” are subjective, the principle is clear enough, referring to a plot-driven, fictional work, which falls into one or more categories of the literary genres recognised by publishers and readers (historical fiction, romance, thriller etc.) and which is marketed to the general public (albeit specific groups of that market) rather than an elite, highly-educated readership. Emphasising this contrast in readership, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson declares that it is, “defined by what it is not: ‘literature’ … Whereas “literature” is indifferent to (if not contemptuous of) the marketplace, original, and complex, popular fiction is simple, sensuous, exaggerated, exciting, and formulaic”.5 He suggests that in the popular imagination, “real” authors are literary artists who labour intensively over their products, while popular authors churn out pot-boilers with ease. Yet as he also stresses, the boundaries are not so clear cut; some literary novels sell more copies than those traditionally regarded as popular, and many of the readers of one are also readers of the other. Nevertheless, the basic distinction remains: “a novel is “popular fiction” if its success is measured (by the public and its publisher) as much by its sales and the devotion of fans (by its author) as opposed to timeless literary quality”.6 This book therefore takes as its working definition of popular fiction, prose fiction of these various genres that is readily available to the general public. Popular fiction, according to this definition, is thought to have emerged in the late nineteenth century as genres such as detective stories, historical fiction, science fiction, romance and Gothic horror, began to materialize in their modern forms. Genres themselves, however, alter over time in response to political and social conditions, including developments in technology, changes with regard to publishing, media and the world of business, as well as the shifting tastes of readers over time.7 Thus the reception of common genres is itself in a state of continual evolution, influenced in particular by the relationship between popular fiction and media such as radio, television, cinema and the internet. In particular, in the post-modern world, genres may overlap, and new sub-genres appear, with popularity growing for forms such as alternative 4  Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998; Ken Gelder: Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field, New York: Routledge, 2004. 5  Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, “Popular Fiction Studies: The Advantages of a New Field”, Studies in Popular Culture 33.1 (Fall 2010) 22. 6  Ibid. 7  McCracken (1998) 12.

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history novels, that are a crossover between fantasy/science fiction and history. Similarly sub-genres have emerged, with categories such as Latino Detective fiction and gay romance finding their places upon the shelves of bookshops and libraries.

Popular Fiction and Cultural History

The term ‘popular’, of course, has meaning far beyond successful sales figures, carrying connotations of a varied, and sometimes conflicting, range of ideas: the rights and power of the people as whole; dangerous ambition; and “low” or “vulgar” content and appeal. Moreover, works of popular culture, whether they are literature, film, or some other media, are produced for the people, or a particular segment thereof, but not necessarily at the demand of this target group. Thus, the study of popular culture is a complicated affair: For anyone trying to make sense of the ‘popular’, this tension between what is genuinely a manifestation of popular taste or will and what is imposed upon people by those for whom culture is a business constitutes the central historical dynamic of modern popular culture.8 In considering popular fiction, this volume fits into the wider context of the reception within popular culture. Such culture is particularly revealing in that it reflects widespread, deep-seated, and often unquestioned, social mores and beliefs, in a way that more self-conscious or elitist media do not. Although the study of popular culture, which is informed by a critical theory perspective, was once thought of as a debased and inferior form of culture, it has come to be regarded as a serious and important area of academic research. This research, with its investigation of the non-elitist mainstream, enables us to examine society and the trends and underlying assumptions of the members of that society.

The Study of Popular Fiction

Within popular culture, popular fiction is in itself a rather hybrid creature in the world of literary research; as fiction it is often marginalised, regarded as ‘literature’ and left to literary scholars by those involved in cultural studies. On the other hand, as a popular genre, it is often disregarded by scholars of 8  Ibid.

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literature, working perhaps from ideologically elitist assumptions, under the premise that it is not worthy of investigation. For a long time, popular fiction was subsumed under the wider category of popular culture, despite the fact that, as Michael Butter stresses, “This is a mistake: just as film and television have developed their own approaches that reflect the unique social, cultural, political, and industrial dimensions of each medium, so popular fiction should occupy its own critical space”.9 The earliest approach to the study of popular fiction was to examine it for evidence of “both symptom and cause of a generalized social problem” of cultural degeneracy.10 Early studies used traditional methodologies of literary criticism, applying them to popular fiction, without regard for context, in an era before issues such as ideology, structuralism and historicism had developed. With the emergence of such understandings, and the growth of cultural studies, more nuanced studies appeared, as the importance of popular novels as a reflection of socio-political insights was recognised. The ideas that there are multiple understandings and meanings to a text, and that the reader plays a role in the reception of a work, led to a very different style of interpretations, as social and political contexts were considered alongside aesthetic worth. In particular, the influence of feminism has been a prominent catalyst for the study of reception in this field, in which books are often marketed at, and bought by, men or women specifically. It is now accepted that the study of popular fiction must, as McCracken argues, be a consideration of the relationship between three elements, the text, the world and the reader.11 No books, especially books freely bought by the reader for pleasure, exist in a vacuum, and the work itself is a product of the surrounding society, its success and popularity fueled in part by reader expectations, which both receive the work and shape future texts. In the twenty-first century, with the emergence of fan-fiction and the accessibility of authors to their readers, and vice versa, via social media, this is truer than ever. Additionally other factors such as market research and publisher or editorimposed changes, as response to this research, also play a significant role, even to the extent of imposing formulae and templates that authors must follow in some cases, the Mills & Boon romances being the most prominent of these.

9   Michael Butter, “Caught between Cultural and Literary Studies, Popular Fiction’s Double Otherness”, Journal of Literary Theory 4/2 (2010) 199–216. 10  Tony Bennet (ed.), Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading (New York and London: Routledge, 1990) xi. 11  McCracken (1998) 1–17.

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Classical Reception

The field of Classical Reception Studies has developed alongside, influenced by but to a certain extent independent of, reception theory, and is in fact now one of the fastest growing research areas in Classical Studies. Classical Reception effectively considers “the artistic or intellectual processes involved in selecting, imitating or adapting ancient works”,12 focusing on the reciprocal connection between ancient source text (used in Barthes’ sense to mean not just written accounts, but any item to be studied) and the receiving work. This form of reception studies therefore differs from other forms of reception, in that it generally concentrates upon a receiving text, and how it has reinterpreted an aspect of the Classical world, rather than the readers’ receptions of that text, as is usually understood in wider reception studies.13 Classical Reception Studies first began in the last decade of the twentieth century and over the past quarter decade has increased in theoretical sophistication, under the influence of the approach of Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss, who stressed the role of the theoretical reader and the dialectical aspects of reception. Charles Martindale played a central role in the development of the field, pushing classicists to theorize reception, first in his pioneering article, Redeeming The Text, and then in a number of publications over the following fifteen years.14 Martindale’s approach argued against “ ‘positivistic’ modes of enquiry—about how classical texts mean and how they may most profitably be interpreted”,15 and introduced another concept of reception into the field of Classical Reception Studies, causing it to develop somewhat differently from traditional Reception Studies. Where those involved in reception theory used the term to refer to the reader’s reception of a text, Martindale suggested a 12  Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 5. 13  See Nick Lowe, “What Classicists Do When They Do Reception”, Teaching Reception Studies, London, November 21 2007, Institute of Classical Studies. 14  Charles Martindale, “Redeeming the text: the validity of comparisons of Classical and postClassical literature. A view from Britain”, Arion (3rd series) 1.3 (1992) 45–75; Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993); “Reception”, in Simon Hornblower, and Anthony Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edn.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003) 1294–5; “Reception and the Classics of the Future”, Council of University Classics Departments Bulletin 34 (2005) (available from http://www.rhul.ac.uk/classics/cucd/martindale05.html. (accessed 10 December 2014); Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas, Classics and the Uses of Reception (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 2006). 15  Charles Martindale, “Reception—a new humanism? Receptivity, pedagogy, the trans­ historical”, Classical Receptions Journal 5.2 (2013) 169.

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somewhat broader definition, expanding the concept of the reception to include the reception of an earlier period of civilization by a later one. Although his approach was somewhat elitist, with its emphasis on the aesthetic value of a text as the main criterion of its worth, this expansion of the concept of reception led to the development of ideas about classical reception that differ markedly from wider reception studies. Unlike in traditional studies in this field, where reception is understood to refer to readers’ receptions of a particular text, the emphasis in classical reception is on the author of the modern text, as a reader and receiver of an ancient text. It therefore considers at least three viewpoints—the original Latin or Greek text, the later reception of that text, and our own reading of both.16 Because of this, in the words of Lorna Hardwick, Classical Reception Studies “participate in the continuous dialogue between the past and the present and also require some ‘lateral’ dialogue in which crossing boundaries of place, language or genre is as important as crossing those of time.”17 According to Classical Reception Studies, then, all later uses of the classical worlds are examples of reception, so that the text itself is both a receiver of the ancient tradition, and an equally valid interpretation; and, crucially, “Meaning is always realized at the point of reception.”18 This approach is inspired by Kantian aesthetics, and endorses the receptions as valid rather than derivative works. In this way, Classical Reception takes the place of the positivistic attitude to classics, previously commonly accepted, in which the ancient text was idealised as the only true and pure form of the work. Martindale’s Kantian aesthetics approach to Classical Reception was an important stimulus to the development of theory, but it also had inadequacies. Others felt that this methodology did not give sufficient importance to the role of social context. Believing that both source text and reception text were influenced by the surrounding societies and cultures of each, scholars sought for theories that acknowledged this fact in a way that the Kantian approach, with its emphasis on the ‘disinterested’ nature of aesthetic response, was unable to accommodate. As in other disciplines, whose developing theories of reception are reflected in Machor and Goldstein’s collection,19 so in Classics the concepts of the nature of reception began to widen and alter.

16  Ibid., 172. 17  Hardwick (2003) 4. 18  Martindale (1993) 3. 19  James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein, eds. Reception study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies. (NY: Psychology Press) 2001.

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Within the field of classical reception, scholars such as Simon Goldhill, Lorna Hardwick and Edith Hall have seen reception as a form of cultural history.20 Where the Kantian approach privileged the individual author as the site of reception, without taking into account the historical, political, social or religious contexts, this school of thought argued for different ways of considering reception. Goldhill, for example, suggested that meaning is realized “in the process of reception” rather than “at the point of reception”, and that reception be viewed as “an event within cultural history.”21 Edith Hall’s approach is a new historicist, cultural materialist methodology, as she examines historical contexts and political implications in order to comprehend reception.22 More recently, David Hopkins has attempted to reconcile the two schools of thought by emphasising the dialogic aspect of the relationship between the classical sources and later receptions. He argues that the creators of the works of reception are engaged in transhistorical conversation with the ancients, in which self-discovery and self-transcendence are as important as any simple ‘accommodation’ of ancient texts to modern tastes.23 Stressing the power of a reception to express a wider meaning than its original sources, and also contending that the creator of that reception exists in a wider societal, historical and literary context, he considers receptions in terms of a dialogue that crosses time and culture. According to this view, the analysis of reception should take into account not only how the ancient texts have been transformed, but also how our understanding of these receptions guides our insights into the ancient world. Hopkins’ approach, like that of Goldhill, Hardwick and Hall, continues to stress the importance of the cultural context, albeit while maintaining 20  Major works include Lorna Hardwick, Translating Words, Translating Cultures (Lon­ don: Duckworth, 2000); Hardwick (2003); Lorna Hardwick, and Christopher Stray, A Companion to Classical Receptions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); Edith Hall, “Putting the class into Classical reception”, in Hardwick and Stray, A Companion to Classical Receptions (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World) (Oxford: Blackwell 2008) 386–97; Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses: a Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey (London and NY: IB Tauris, 2008); Edith Hall and Stephe Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice (London: Duckworth, 2010); Simon Goldhill, “Cultural History and Aesthetics: Why Kant is No Place to Start Reception Studies”, in Hall and Harrop (2010) 56–70. 21  Goldhill ibid., 67. 22  See especially Edith Hall, “Towards a Theory of Performance Reception”, in Hall and Harrop (2010) 10–28. 23  David Hopkins, Conversing With Antiquity: English Poets and the Classics, from Shakespeare to Pope. Classical Presences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 1–14.

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Martindale’s stress on aesthetics. The essays in this collection recognise this, and follow approaches that centre on cultural history interpretations, while still taking into account the model proposed by Martindale, recognising that receptions of the ancient world within popular fiction are both valid and independent creations, but also products of their own societies.

Classical Reception and Popular Fiction

Ancient Greece and Rome are societies that have had, and continue to have, a profound impact on our own. There are myriad receptions of many aspects of the classical world that appear across the spectrum in the modern world, with popular fiction being no exception, as the ancient world, like so many other periods and cultures, has caught the eye of authors. There is, in fact, a striking overlap between classics and popular fiction, stemming from widespread perceptions of both. Genre fiction was for a long time regarded as low brow and of little ­importance.24 Partly because both industry and entertainment are major elements within popular fiction,25 which is written and sold primarily for financial reasons, the worth of such writing was derided. Regarded as formulaic and lacking in worth of any kind, it was rarely studied or quoted and when it was, it was usually to back up claims of social degeneracy and declining standards.26 Such a perception has persisted in varying degrees and may still occasionally be seen among scholars, critics and even readers, as is reflected by a 2012 article in the New Yorker by Arthur Krystal, which talks of the ‘guilty pleasures’ of reading genre fiction.27 Nevertheless, that situation has on the whole altered radically as time as has gone by, as the reaction to that article indicates.28 The growth of the feminist-cultural studies approach contributed

24  For a survey of the study of popular fiction as a field, see Schneider-Mayerson (2010) 21–35. 25  See Ken Gelder, Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (London and NY: Routledge, 2004) 13–16. 26  Tony Bennett (1990) xi; Ken Gelder, Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (New York and London: Routledge, 2004) 40–43. 27   http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/28/easy-writers (accessed 26 September 2016). 28   h ttp://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/its-genre-not-that-theres-anything -wrong-with-it (accessed 26 September 2016).

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to this understanding, for the texts were taken more seriously, and their worth as cultural indicators appreciated, as they were interpreted in different ways. As time passed there was a recognition that these texts work on multiple levels and that readers possess “the ability and tendency to reinterpret texts that are seemingly conservative and patriarchal in a resistant, transgressive, unpredictable and/or socially and politically informed manner”.29 It is now the case that genre fiction is understood as a culture industry that encompasses, in the words of Ken Gelder, “an entire apparatus of production, distribution … and consumption”,30 that goes beyond the text itself, and reveals contemporary attitudes, values and norms. Accordingly, it is recognised as a valuable tool for understanding the society for which it is produced. Conversely, the classical world, often regarded as elitist, intellectual and above all, cultured, is also, in the popular imagination, the subject of popular stereotypes revolving round toga parties, orgies and slave-owning imperialists as depicted most commonly on screen.31 This correspondence between popular fiction and the ancient world from a modern perspective makes the methodologies of classical reception, which have been developed in recent years by classical scholars, particularly useful as tools which may be applied to a field of literature that has often been neglected. The importance of studying the products of this culture within the field of classical reception is reflected in the quantities of recent work on the reception of the classical world in television and movies. These studies demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the classical past, as Greece and Rome are adapted and re-interpreted in light of contemporary concerns. Greece and Rome feature in popular fiction in a number of ways. There are, of course, many examples of traditional historical fiction, novels set in the ancient world. Some specific sub-genres have even sprung up within historical fiction. These include novel form retellings of ancient history, in books such as 29  Schneider-Mayerson (2010) 30. 30  Gelder (2004) 2. 31  There is a substantial and ever-growing body of work on the depiction of Rome on screen and how these portrayals have furthered such stereotypes, but for a few examples see Monica Cyrino, Big screen Rome (Wiley-Blackwell 2005), Rome Season One: History Makes Television (John Wiley & Sons 2009), Rome, Season Two: Trial and Triumph (Edinburgh University Press 2015); Sandra Joshel, Martha Malamud, and Donald T. McGuire, Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture (Johns Hopkins 2001); Martin M. Winkler, “The Roman Empire in American Cinema after 1945”, Classical Journal 93 (1998) 167–96, Gladiator: Film and History (Wiley-Blackwell 2004), Spartacus: Film and History (Wiley-Blackwell 2006), The Fall of the Roman Empire (Wiley-Blackwell 2009); Maria Wyke, “Ancient Rome and the traditions of film history”, Screening the Past, 6 (1999) 32ff.

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Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series and the works of Mary Renault; military fiction, as exemplified by the works of Simon Scarrow; Roman detective fiction, a substantial sub-genre to which the first part of this book is devoted;32 and of course, ancient Christian and Jewish fiction, discussed in the final section of this work. Classical mythology is another field that has been a source of inspiration for artists throughout the ages, and continues to be recast according to changing concepts, or to subtly underlie modern works. Other receptions take the form of modern reinterpretations of ancient texts or societal elements as they are remoulded and given new shape and meaning. This book examines these different ways in which the ancient world has been received in modern popular fiction. Inevitably, a volume such as this can do no more than provide a tasting of the banquet of receptions that exist. Individual interests of the contributors obviously played a part, but the major limitation was imposed by space constraints, which prevented the inclusion of both many individual works, and whole sub-genres and authors. Military fiction, for example, a profuse area of literature, does not feature in this collection; nor does the author Mary Renault, whose works of ancient historical fiction were so influential. Nevertheless, one section not usually found in works on classical reception has been included, namely that of the reception of Jewish and Christian cultures in Popular Fiction. There are two reasons for this choice. Firstly, the books concerning ancient Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman world have occupied an important place within the historical fiction tradition, due to the fact that the relationship between the early Christian and Jewish worlds, and that of Imperial Rome, is deeply intertwined in general in the history of western civilisation, with its dual Judeo-Christian and classical roots. This link is even more fundamental in the area of popular fiction, where historical novels set in Rome, such as Quo Vadis, The Last Days of Pompeii and Ben-Hur, were so often those of early Christianity. These novels, as they were adapted to screen, played a huge part in the creation of a conception of the ancient world in the popular imagination. To ignore such a significant strand of fiction would therefore diminish and limit this work narrowly for no good reason. Secondly, despite the western-centric emphasis of study of the ancient world, there has been a growing acknowledgement, in light of the development of post-colonial studies in recent years, of the fact that the ancient world, like the modern, was a diverse society, including a range of ethnic groupings. The Jewish and Christian populations of the ancient Mediterranean are just two examples of such groups, but ones whose reception has coloured Western 32  See the first section of this book, particularly chapter one, for an outline of such fiction.

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civilisation centrally. Including these communities in studies such as this one is a recognition that ancient society was more than just classical GrecoRoman culture, and that the multiple strands that contributed to the society as a whole have had influence as deep as what is traditionally regarded as ‘classical’. For reasons of manageability, the book focuses almost exclusively on works in the English language (the exception being one work in Hebrew, Akiva’s Orchard by Yochi Brandes; Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s Chimaira is also included, but in translation), from the United States and Britain. While some papers feature works from the twentieth or even nineteenth century (Ben-Hur, The Hobbit, The Warriors), the main emphasis of this book is also on recent works, which are presented from within their social contexts of twenty-first century Western society. Clearly then, this volume is far from exhaustive, and indeed no work of this kind could, or perhaps even should, be anything like all-inclusive; but it does introduce a wide cross-section of examples from the major elements of the field, and opens up some important questions about the nature of these receptions and the abiding attraction that the ancient world, in all its variety, continues to hold for writers. The opening section therefore addresses one of the most popular kinds of reception of ancient Rome in particular, namely crime-fiction. In the first chapter, Lisa Maurice examines this sub-genre that has developed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, examining the origins of this genre and some of its central features, so that this chapter also serves as an introduction to this section of the book as a whole. Maurice argues that the roots of the genre are located in the hard-boiled detective fiction of the twentieth century, due to an identification of ancient Rome with the huge and corrupt life of the American city. She considers the range of such books, examining the geographical and historical settings, as well as the varying natures of the detectives, against the background of the social contexts of the modern world, studying both the constraints and opportunities that the Roman setting provides for authors, as well as the influence of contemporary popular depictions of Rome on the detective novels. Anat Koplowitz-Breier continues the Roman detective theme in her essay, “A Roman and a Foreigner: Lindsey Davis’s New Roman Detective Series”, but focuses on one particular case study, the recent Flavia Albia series by Lindsey Davis. Koplowitz-Breier examines the way in which Davis deals with her heroine, and her status as “Other”, which stems from her role both as a woman and as a foreigner. Outlining the difficulties inherent in presenting such a figure, Koplowitz-Breier also suggests some reasons for the choice of protagonist, and explores how Davis has dealt with these problems in this new series.

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The final paper in this section, “An Open account from the past always needs to be settled”: Chimaira (2001) / The Ancient Curse (2010) and receiving the past”, by Claudia Caia Julia Fratini examines how Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s novel Chimaira (2001) (released in English translation as The Ancient Curse (2010)) blends the past and present to weave a story that is detective novel, thriller and commentary on how the past and present cannot be viewed in isolation as both are inextricably implicated in each other. Fratini examines aspects of the popular literary genres of the detective novel and thriller, as well as how objects of the past resonate, creating stories and interpretations that are received in the present. Through theoretical interrogations of classical reception, she explores the reception of the ancient past in popular fiction and its implications, focusing on how the past implicates the present, as well as how received texts and objects from the past can be utilised to incite ‘moral action’. The second part of the book looks at how the classical world has been used within the modern, transposing stories or elements of ancient Greece and Rome into contemporary contexts with newfound relevance, and reinventing both in the process. The first paper in this section, Eran Almagor’s “Going Home: Xenophon’s Anabasis in Sol Yurick’s The Warriors”, looks at the 1965 novel by Sol Yurick, which transposes Xenophon’s world of the Ten Thousand in the Anabasis to the modern grim street-gang universe. The paper demonstrates that Yurick’s novel is far more than an artificial reading of the ancient text, however, but rather a real and rich portrayal of aspects and contexts that Xenophon himself downplays, looking at the concept of identity and belonging from the points of view of gender, age-group and race. Almagor argues that latent components in Xenophon’s Anabasis were deconstructed by Yurick only to be reassembled in a new, insightfully thought-provoking manner, which casts the original depiction in a complex and ironic way. Dor Yacobi’s paper focuses on younger readers, examining Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, and demonstrating how the works are based upon a fusion between ancient Rome and contemporary reality television, arguing that the latter takes the place of the former in modern society. She also illustrates how modern perceptions of Rome, and in particular cinematic portrayals of the ancient world, have influenced Collins’ depiction of her New-Rome, called Panem, reflecting the interplay between the ancient world, its reception in film and contemporary fiction. The final paper in this section, by Amanda Potter, looks at the rapidly growing field of fan fiction, in which both ancient texts and modern receptions of those texts provide the framework for amateur writers to produce works that they self-publish, usually on the internet. Utilising the example of the figure of the Greek female heroic figure of Atalanta, Potter demonstrates how fan

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fiction writers engage with the ancient world in a manner that can be considered as a continuation of the variant retelling of mythic stories that reach back to antiquity, as well as a unifying force whereby writers across the world connect with each other through common stories. Classical texts based upon mythology, as introduced by Potter, becomes the major focus of the third section, which provides considerations of how these texts have been reshaped in modern popular fictional receptions. Anne Sinha’s chapter on the reception of Achilles in two recent novels, by Madeline Miller and Byrne Fone (“Achilles, from Epic Hero to Popular Lord/Lady-Killer: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and Achilles, a love story by Byrne Fone”), looks at how both authors engage with two classical traditions of Achilles as a great warrior and a supreme lover, but react to these traditions in very different ways. Sinha demonstrates how in Miller’s version, Patroclus becomes the main character of the novel, subverting the martial values of the epic, while in Fone’s the Iliadic war narrative is moulded, albeit in a slightly forced manner, into a gay romance novel, as the book becomes an assertion of the existence of gay culture. She emphasises too how the description of Achilles is influenced by the cinematic heritage, which is such an essential element of the construction of the image of the ancient world in contemporary culture. Where the Iliad was the source text concerning the first essay in the section, the Odyssey is the focus of the second. In “ ‘Home is behind, the world ahead’: Reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit as a Story of Xeiniē or Homeric Hospitality” Hamish Williams demonstrates close parallels between Homer’s Odyssey and Tolkien’s The Hobbit, arguing that both are rooted in the treatment of a form of ‘hospitality’, that is based on the ancient Greek, particularly Homeric, conception of the relationship between a guest and a host, known as xeiniē. He demonstrates that reading The Hobbit in conjunction with the Odyssey helps us to re-evaluate Tolkien’s story as an ethical quest, based upon an ethics which lies in the social institution of the home. Lily Glasner, in her chapter, “Cupid and Psyche: A Love Story (?) in Comics and Children’s Literature”, takes us into the realm of juvenile fiction, considering how Apuleius’ famous tale, Cupid and Psyche, has been manipulated in order to suit it for a younger audience. Considering the adaptations in light of contemporary debates about the roles of censorship generally, and sex specifically, within the field of children’s literature, Glasner focuses on two specific adaptations, M. Charlotte Craft and K.Y. Craft’s Cupid and Psyche (1996), and Ryan Foley and artist Sankha Banerjee’s graphic novel, Stolen Hearts: The Love of Eros and Psyche (2009). In each case, she demonstrates how the sexuality has been removed from the story, mirroring as well as reinforcing an existing norm of sanitizing texts intended directly for children. Furthermore, the tale has

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been romanticized, resulting in a reinforcement of the ideal of heterosexual marriage. The final section of the book, as discussed above, turns to a different reception strand, that of ancient Judeo-Christianity within popular fiction. Emily Lord-Kambitsch’s paper, “Emotionality and Reception of the Ancient World in Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ” looks at one of the most influential novels of all time, Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur, considering issues of emotionality, and its dynamic in that text. As Lord Kambitsch points out, the novel created an unprecedented cultural sensation in the United States, with Wallace being regarded after his death as a literary “immortal” who could be compared to Homer and Vergil for his so-called divinely inspired text that came to be considered as an American origin narrative. In her essay, she uses theoretical approaches to emotions in the historical novel and American biblical fiction in order to investigate how Wallace motivates readers to perceive ethnographically coded models of emotional behaviour exhibited by Roman, Jewish, and proto-Christian characters. Haim Perlmutter’s paper deals with another novel which proved the inspiration for screen adaptation, E. Gann’s The Antagonists, upon which the miniseries Masada was based. Focusing on two secondary figures in the novel, Perlmutter examines the way in which different religious sects are depicted in the book, drawing conclusions from this as to how Gann perceived the society of Judaea in the time of the Great Jewish Revolt, and how contemporary conceptions of sects such as the Sadducees and Pharisees influenced the writing of the work. The final paper, Tal Ilan’s “Jewish Women Writing Historical Novels Based on Rabbinic Sources” considers two books, written by Jewish female authors, that she feels unite a literary and historical trend that is the culmination of a long process within rabbinic studies. The books in question, Akiva’s Orchard by Yochi Brandes and Rav Hisda’s Daughter by Maggie Anton, as Ilan demonstrates, are the product of a scholarly revolution which, at the end of the 20th century opened up talmudic studies for women. She discusses the nature of rabbinic biography as it has changed over recent decades, and then goes on to examine the way that feminist scholars have in the last thirty years scrutinized rabbinic texts. Looking at these points in the context of how Jewish studies and rabbinic literature have developed against the background of the modern state of Israel, she demonstrates how both books, in spite of ostensibly being biographies of ancient Jewish women, are a product of contemporary forces in both Israel and the diaspora.

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Overall, this volume presents an eclectic and hopefully engaging range of case-studies, demonstrating the wide compass of receptions of the ancient world in popular fiction. These are important as a form of both popular culture, in that it is aimed at the mainstream, ‘man (and woman) in the street’, and of reception of the ancient world in its representations and transmissions of ideas about the peoples and ideas of that world, whether they be Greek, Roman, Jewish or Christian. It is hoped that this book will provide a stimulus for further scholarship, and be but the first of a host of works to consider this fascinating and enduring field of research and advance it in the years to come.

Part 1 Rewriting the Classics in Crime Fiction and Thrillers

∵

CHAPTER 1

From I, Claudius to Private Eyes: Rome and the Detective in Popular Fiction Lisa Maurice Over recent decades, the quantity of crime fiction set in ancient Rome has grown enormously, leading to the establishment of a clear sub-genre of popular fiction. In this paper I examine the origins of this genre and some of its central features, as well as considering the reasons for the popularity of this genre, an issue that is inextricably entwined with how Rome as a whole is perceived in the western world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. 1

Roots of the Genre

1.1 Detective Fiction Detective fiction is generally acknowledged to have been invented by Edgar Allen Poe, whose fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, the hero of three of his short stories published from 1846–1849, possessed an ability to find hidden truths. In creating Dupin, it has been argued that Poe anticipated many of the elements which would become standard in detective fiction.1 From these beginnings, three main kinds of fictional detective developed.2 Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) is generally held to be the first great detective novel, but it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who in 1887 gave fresh impetus to the emerging form of the genre with his creation of Sherlock Holmes, probably the most famous of fictional detectives and the first one to be a professional investigator of crimes. Holmes was the inspiration for a whole sub-genre 1  See e.g., William L. De Andrea, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television (New York: Macmillan, 1994): “Poe seems to have anticipated virtually every important development to follow in the genre, from the idea of a lesser side-kick to the detective as narrator (later epitomised in the Dr. Watson of the Sherlock Holmes stories) to the concept of an armchair detective to the prototype of the secret service story.” 2  See Kittredge, William and Steven M. Krauzer, The Great American Detective (New York: Mentor, 1978) i–xxxiv.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004346383_003

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of fictional detectives, who were cerebral genius sleuths, puzzle solvers who were independent and detached in nature, despite their well-meaning devoted sidekicks. The popularity of such figures reached its height in the so called ‘golden age’ of detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, as epitomized by writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Most of these authors were British, and even those writers who were American infused their works with a British touch. In reaction to this, a second model of fictional detective emerged in America, that of the hard boiled private investigator, a tough guy but one with a strong moral code and well developed sense of honour. The works of Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane epitomize such characters, the creation of which was influenced very much by the Prohibition gangster culture of the period, which was a far cry from the English country house and village societies that epitomized the British crime writing. The third stereotype of the detective character is that of the police detective, a figure who came to literary prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, and was the antithesis of the bumbling incompetent constable who stood as a foil to the detective’s brilliance. Self-confident and capable, this detective, as epitomised by characters as Elizabeth George’s Thomas Lynley and Susan Hill’s Simon Serailler, reflected an increasing demand for realism in the second half of the twentieth century, whereby crimes were solved by those professionals who actually fulfilled this role in society.3 Many detective novels feature not just one sleuth but a duo. In some cases, such as that of Hercule Poirot and his sidekick, Hastings, the hero is accompanied by a companion whose role is to provide a foil for the detective’s brilliance, to narrate events and sometimes unintentionally to inspire the great investigator to the solution through an offhand remark. Other partnerships, however, like that of Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe are those of equal sleuthing ability, and the protagonists work as a team. Many of such duos are composed of two contrasting figures, whether man and woman, or of differing ethnic, religious or social backgrounds, an aspect which allows the author to explore differences of class or social issues at particular periods or places.4

3  Martin Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 5. 4  Muller, Marcia, and Bill Pronzini, Detective Duos: The Best Adventures of Twenty-Five CrimeSolving Twosomes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 3–14.

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This is perhaps particularly important in detective fiction, which, in the words of Robin Winks “becomes the mirror of society”.5 Indicative of this, detective fiction has seen the development of sub genres featuring female detectives, or those of a particular ethnic or racial background, as such issues have attained prominence in society. As Casey Cothran and Mercy Cannon have pointed out: Despite the fact that works of detective and crime fiction were rejected by academics (as formulaic and thus non-literary), for a significant period of time, the modern scholar might claim that, in spite of this, detective fiction has become a dominant literary genre, poised on the cutting edge of cultural history precisely because it incorporates—through its focus on mystery and the mysterious—queer discourse, racial discourse, debates about gender and sexuality, discussions of disability, multiculturalism and global narratives.6 Clearly then, the study of detective fiction can provide valuable insights into a range of cultural and social issues and questions. 1.2 Historical Fiction If the detective novel shows up social debates, by means of focus on the other in the form of mystery, historical fiction provides a parallel form of enlightenment through its highlighting of the differences and similarities between the historical period in which the book is set and that in which it is written. From the very beginning of the genre, which is generally stated to have started with Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley,7 the historical setting has been used “as a means to convey change amongst other historical processes”.8 This was noted by Georg Lukács, who, as a Marxist literary theorist, regarded the development of

5  Robin Winks, Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980) 9. 6  Casey Cothran and Mercy Cannon, New Perspectives on Detective Fiction: Mystery Magnified (London: Routledge, 2015) 4. 7  Pace Richard Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 1–8. 8  Matthew J. Phillpott, A Novel Approaches Prelude: A Brief History of Historical Fiction, https://ihrconference.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/mphillpott-history-of-historical-fiction .pdf (accessed 11 November 2015).

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historical fiction in the nineteenth century as a result of social forces and a new historical awareness.9 Despite this development, and in contrast to detective fiction, historical fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, although appearing in greater numbers, also became more marginal.10 After the Second World War, however, the situation changed somewhat. Historical fiction rose in popularity, and indeed flooded the market. This was at least in part due to an altered social reality, as Elodie Rousselot describes: Important political events in the wake of both World Wars and the dismantling of the British Empire complicated the need to develop a common set of cultural images on which to establish a national identity; as a result, the place and function of historical fiction in British literature also became more complex. The returns to the past in literary works of the period partly had to do with a fascination with previous eras of uncontested British cultural and political superiority, but they also indicated a wish to understand the changed state of affairs in the present.11 Another fact was the change in the field of academic study of history, with its move from a politics based approach to social history in the 1970s, when culture and gender studies and research into the lives and status of non-elite groups first began to appear in large numbers. As a result of all these developments, interest in everyday life at different periods grew, and in response both authors and readers turned to historical fiction, which was lauded for generating a popular interest in social and national history, because it was “more 9   George Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1962). Lukács was enormously influential, and his ideas coloured much of the later theoretical work concerned with the historical novel. Thus, see Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2010). As Jerome de Groot summarises (29), “For Lukács then, the historical novel is keenly important for various reasons. It represents historical process, and in doing so gestures towards actual historical progress. The realism of the novel allows the reader to engage with and empathise with historical individuals and thence gain a sense of their own historical specificity. It is able to communicate to people a sense of their own historicity, and the ways that they might be able to construct historically inflected identities for themselves. The historical novel has a humanist impulse to teach and educate, and this pedagogical element is crucial for Lukács; it is the movement to historicised revelation and understanding which is the point of the exercise.” 10  Ibid., 45. 11  “Historical Fiction”, in Brian W. Shaffer (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) 174.

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accessible than biography or ‘proper’ history”.12 Thus, an explosion of works of historical fiction occurred, a growth which in itself led to an expansion of the genre in different ways, as authors tackled historical periods from a range of viewpoints and agendas.13 Certain trends had always been apparent; Westerns had already proved a prolific subgenre between the 1920s and 1950s, while historical Romance took prominence in the 1970s, with their “lavish tales of wild passion and starcrossed lovers set against vividly rendered historical backdrops”.14 The vast output of this genre led in fact to it being held in low esteem, despite a number of high quality and highly valued works which were in fact set in the past, but which, due to this disdain, were not even classified as historical fiction.15 Over the past twenty five years, however, there has arisen a previously unparalleled enthusiasm for history. Although it was claimed in the last decade of the twentieth century that this period marked “an end to history”, this has proved to be far from true. On the one hand, nationalism has risen once more, but on the other, globalism has come to the fore with the birth of the internet. Historical awareness has grown, stimulated by widespread access to vast amounts of information on a hitherto unknown scale. Not only historical fiction, but also media such as cinema and television, have both caused and responded to this fascination with the past, so that there has been a rehabilitation of the genre, in part at least due to the success of films such as The Girl with the Pearl Earring and Gladiator, and television series such as The Tudors, Rome and most recently Wolf Hall.16 The continuing popularity of historical fiction may be noted by the existence of a magazine entitled The Historical Novels Review, which reviews some eight hundred books every year. This popularity is partially a result of its wide ranging nature, enabling it to encompass many other sub-genres and approaches.17 12   Samantha Young, “Based on a True Story: Contemporary Historical Fiction and Historiographical Theory”, Otherness: Essays and Studies 2.1 August 2011 (http://www .otherness.dk/fileadmin/www.othernessandthearts.org/Publications/Journal_Other ness/Otherness__Essays_and_Studies_2.1/1._Samantha_Young.pdf) (accessed 30.11.2015). 13  See Jennifer S. Baker, The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Historical Fiction (Chicago: ALA editions, 2015) 2; Sarah L. Johnson, Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre (Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2005) 4. 14  Johnson (2005) 1. 15  In the words of Johnson, “Historical Fiction was everywhere, but nowhere: it has become the genre that dared not speak its name”. ibid., 2. 16  Ibid., 2–3. 17  It is notable however that little attention has often been paid to historical fiction by historians themselves, despite the fact that they were often taken by their audience to be

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In particular, historical fiction has appeal for both males and females, albeit in very different forms, with men’s fiction featuring “adventure, warfare, murder mysteries”, and reinforcing and articulating “male self-expression, masculinity, and power structures”,18 while that aimed at females may emphasise love and romance, but in many cases also aim to shed light on strong female characters from history who are usually kept more in the shadows. Recent years have seen a new development, as post-modernism has turned its attention to historical fiction. Works such as Hilary Mantel’s novels about Henry VIII’s court, and television programmes like Sherlock relate to the past in ways that are different from earlier historical novels. This sub-genre is described by Elodie Rousselot as ‘neo-historical novel’. Although it is set in the past, ‘neo-historical’ fiction consciously attempts to interact with the concerns and occupations of contemporary society. By making explicit connections with the modern world, these works display a self-conscious awareness of their own constructedness, this enabling critical reflection on both history and earlier historiography, what Rousselot calls “exoticizing approaches to the past.”19 1.3 Historical Crime Fiction The historical detective novel is therefore a subgenre of both historical fiction and detective fiction. Although examples existed earlier, with books by Agatha Christie, Wallace Irwin and Melville Davison Post among others, this subgenre was widely popularized by Ellis Peters between 1977 and 1994 with her medieval mysteries featuring the monk-sleuth, Cadfael. Later decades have seen an increase in numbers of such works, as their popularity increased.20 This is particularly true of the first decade of the twenty-first century, as a recent article in Publishers Weekly emphasizes: The past decade has seen an explosion in both quantity and quality. Never before have so many historical mysteries been published, by so many gifted writers, and covering such a wide range of times and places. representing an historical reality. As Young (2011) 7–8 points out, “historical fiction deals with issues, events and problems that history proper cannot. Yet because of its hybrid form—borrowing from the schools of fiction and history—it is often seen as impure and subsequently deficient”. 18  Phillpott (2011) n.7; de Groot 70. 19  Elodie Rousselot, Exoticizing the Past in Neo-Historical Fiction (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) 1–12. 20  See Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr,, eds., The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) ix–x.

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As St. Martin’s and Minotaur editor Keith Kahla puts it, “From a small group of writers with a very specialized audience, the historical mystery has become a critically acclaimed, award-winning genre with a toehold on the New York Times bestseller list.”21 Reflecting this popularity, the British Crime Writers’ Association has presented an award, the CWA Historical Dagger award (originally titled the “Ellis Peters Historical Dagger”), to novels in the genre since 1999. One of the main reasons for the popularity and attraction of writers and readers to historical crime fiction is that it, as Browne and Kreiser have pointed out, “is concerned with the major drives of human life” and “registers the actions of the people of the past, recording how they influenced, both good and bad, their future—and our present”.22 Parallels between the historian and the detective, both of whom must attempt to discover the true state of affairs from evidence painstakingly pieced together, also make the two components of the genre compatible bedfellows.23 With this recognition, not only has there been an increase in popularity of the genre, but also a growing seriousness among authors themselves towards the writing of such fiction and among academics as to how they relate to historical crime fiction. With the contemporary interest in groups that were traditionally overlooked—women, slaves, the poor— historical crime has also proved a valuable tool through which to highlight these groups at different times in history, since it more often deals with such characters than does historical fiction, which is often centred around major historical events of figures. Just as the twenty-first century has seen a focus on the historical common man (and woman) in other media—the HBO-BBC series Rome being a notable case in point24—the historical novel reflects similar attitudes, and crime fiction has been taken up eagerly as a medium eminently suited for this trend. Contemporary Roman detective fiction therefore fits into this wider background, as we shall now see.

21  See Lenny Picker, “Mysteries of History”, Publishers Weekly (May 3 2010) http://www .publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-announcements/article/43024 -mysteries-of-history.html (accessed 18 November 2015). 22  Browne and Kreiser (2000) 2. 23  Robin Winks, Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence (New York: Harper Collins, 1968) xiii–xxiv. 24  Monica Cyrino, Rome Season One: History Makes Television (Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 5–7.

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Roman Crime Fiction

2.1 The Growth of the Genre In the context of historical crime fiction, Ancient Rome, from relatively modest beginnings, has become an established setting for such novels, and the figure of the ‘Roman detective’ features in a perhaps surprising number of books, particularly over the past quarter century. Lindsey Davis, for example, mentioned in 2013 that there were “thirty-five people … today, ‘writing in the Roman era’,25 and many of these fall into the crime fiction category. Much of this expansion is a result of the success of the earliest writers of the genre, such as Lindsey Davis, Steven Saylor and John Maddox Roberts, but it is also clearly fueled by the rise in popularity of the ancient world in popular culture as well, with movies such as Gladiator and Troy, television series such as the Starz’ Spartacus productions and the two seasons of HBO-BBC’s Rome, and a large number of historical and pseudo-historical documentary productions by such sources as The History Channel. The writers of Roman crime fiction are both a stimulus to and a result of such products of popular culture, and the style of their works reflects reader expectations. The books share a number of such common characteristics, apart from the Roman time period, that mark them as belonging to a clear sub-genre. Many of them, for example, open with a map and a list of featured characters, usually with sardonically witty short descriptions;26 this is perhaps a signaling of genre similar to the rolling crawl introductions of epic movies. As well as featuring sleuths of some kind, all incorporate elements of popularly recognised Roman culture, such as slaves and mosaics. As a category, Roman crime fiction of this sort has formed a recognisable market in recent years. The growth in popularity of these books can be demonstrated by a quick outline of the figures: prior to 1989, there were only a pair of books by Charles Cornell (Most Delicious Poison, 1951 and Meet Me at Philippi, 1956) and a few scattered novels, one from 1935, one from 1957, and two more from the early

25   http://the-history-girls.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/listening-to-lindsey-davis-by-penny.html (accessed 25 December 2015). 26  Lindsey Davis’ Falco novels are typical, including such lists of Principal Characters at the beginning of each book. Thus, for example, the list in Ode to a Banker includes entires such as “Helena Justina—a heroine (a loyal reader); Ma (Junilla Tacita)—a canny depositor; Pa (Geminus)—a chipped old block” (Ode to a Banker, New York: Warner Books, 2001).

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1980s.27 Since 1988 however twenty-one different authors have each produced series of books that fall into this category, while a small number of writers have written single volumes featuring Roman sleuths. Three of the most popular authors, Steven Saylor, John Maddox Roberts and Lindsey Davis all started their series more or less simultaneously, although each was apparently unaware of the others. Steven Saylor explains, When I started Roman Blood, I thought I was working on a fairly lonely patch of literary ground. It wasn’t until I had finished the manuscript that I saw Colleen McCullough’s epic First Man in Rome in a book store. Well, I figured, as I watched it leap onto the best seller lists, anything that gets readers interested in ancient Rome can only help. Then came Lindsay Davis’ Silver Pigs and John Maddox Roberts’ SPQR, both of which have turned into series. Then I discovered a couple of Roman mysteries that had been published in 1989, A Roman Death by Australian Joan O’Hagan, and Dogheaded Death by Ray Farady Nelson. And when Roman Blood came out, my own publisher had yet another Roman mystery in the very same catalogue, Roman Nights by Ron Burns!.… It’s clear that none of the writers involved took inspiration from the others—it’s just a curious coincidence that we all experienced a similar brainwave at roughly the same time.28 Writers of Roman fiction often talk about the attractions of the period for them as authors. Many mention reading historical fiction as children, or their own love for the period. Saylor, for example, talks of always having been fascinated by Rome from childhood, and studying a great deal of history in college.29 Jane Finnis’ website declares that she has “been fascinated by the past ever since as a child she walked the straight Roman roads of East Yorkshire and discovered that York’s mediaeval Minister was built over something even older, a Roman fortress”, and that at school she “got completely hooked on Roman history” after reading Robert Graves’ Claudius novels;30 she also read history at 27  Wallace Irwin, The Julius Caesar Murder Case (New York, London: D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc., 1935); Charles Edward Gray, Murder Defies the Roman Emperor (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1957); Barbara Hambly, The Quirinal Hill Affair (1983); Michael Levey, An Affair on the Appian Way (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984). 28  Steven Saylor, “All Roads Led to Rome”, Mystery Readers Journal, Historical Mysteries I. Volume 9, No. 2, Summer 1993. 29   http://www.italian-mysteries.com/saylor-interview.html (accessed 27 December 2015). 30   http://www.janefinnis.com/author.htm (accessed 27 December 2015).

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university. David Wishart actually has a degree in classics, and his writing developed as a result of this interest.31 Nevertheless, in spite of the attractions, the choice of period is not without complications, since Roman attitudes are in some ways vastly different from those of the modern world. Some authors exploit the very differences between ancient and modern in order to comment on their own societies. Steven Saylor’s pacifistic hero, Gordianus, expresses values and ideas that would have been regarded as out of place in Ancient Rome, and indeed, are more of a commentary on modern America than the ancient city.32 The issue of slavery is one obvious problem, but one which some authors solve by making their characters overtly humane slave owners, as in the case of Ruth Downie’s Gaius Petrius Ruso, who rescues an abused slave-girl, Tilla, who then becomes his wife. Others deal with the subject head on; Lindsey Davis’ second Flavia Albia novel deals with the subject of domestic slavery, which according to Davis, is “a hard subject, it’s one of the areas where the Romans are different from us”.33 Nevertheless, she tackles it directly in this book, allowing the voice of the nonRoman, the British Flavia Albia, to critique the practice and details of a slave owning society, highlighting that difference in a way that had not been possible while using the voice of the Roman Falco. 2.2 Setting: Period and Location Strikingly, four of the authors mentioned above by Saylor also set their novels in the same period, namely the late republic,34 with only Lindsey Davis breaking the trend with her Falco series set in the time of Vespasian. As the taste for Roman mysteries developed however, other periods were chosen and the various novels in this category now utilise the whole spectrum of Roman history. Yet particular eras of ancient history seem to come to the fore at different times. When the genre first became popular, as just noted, the late Republic, 31   https://helencaldwell.wordpress.com/2010/11/13/interview-with-david-wishart/ (accessed 27 December 2015). 32  Heather Worthington, Key Concepts in Crime Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 139. 33   https://soundcloud.com/audibleuk/lindsey-davis-on-enemies-at (accessed 26 December 2015). 34  It should be noted also that both Steven Saylor and John Maddox Roberts utilize extant instances from Roman history, and texts such as the speeches of Cicero, as source material. See Terrance L. Lewis, “John Maddox Roberts and Steven Saylor: Detecting in the Final Decades of the Roman Republic”, in Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) 22–31.

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centring round figures such as Cicero, and Pompey, was fashionable. By the mid nineteen nineties, it was the early Principate that dominated, with the first books in three different series, by Marilyn Todd, David Wishart and A.C. Tassie, all appearing in 1995. A decade later, the field had diversified enormously. The reigns of Nero and Claudius were the background to three different series whose books first appeared between 2006 and 2009, by Philip Boast, Martha Marks and Robert Colton. Another new series, by Jay Cardam, the first book of which appeared in 2014, was also set in Nero’s reign while Alex Domokos and Rita Toews’ The Centurion (2006) featured that of Claudius. Mike Ripley’s Boudica and the Lost Roman (2005) is also set in 60 CE, in Roman Britain. The Flavians also saw a rise in popularity; apart from Lindsey Davis’ novels which appeared from the earlier years, and Robert Harris’ Pompeii (2003), three authors in the twenty first century, Jane Finnis, Kelli Stanley and Albert A. Bell Jr., whose series began in 2003, 2008 and 2012 respectively, chose to set their works in the reign of Domitian, while Bruce Macbain’s books (2012, 2014) cover both Domitian and Trajan. The second century has also featured; Ruth Downie, whose books were published between 2007 and 2014, chose Hadrian’s reign as her setting, while Alan Scribner’s choice (2013–2014) was that of Antoninus Pius. Unusually, Rosemary Rowe, whose first book in the series was published as early as 1999, sets her works in the reign of Commodus. The second millenium has also seen notice taken of later antiquity with both Paul Doherty (books published 2002–8) and Ben Pastor (2007–8) producing works set in the reign of Diocletian, while Albert Noyer, whose books have been published between 2003 and the present day, chose the fifth century as the setting for his books. The geographical locations in which the books are set also show a wide variation. Unsurprisingly, the city of Rome is by far the most popular setting, with almost exactly half (seventy-six of the hundred and fifty three volumes under discussion) taking place in the capital city. Britain features in a further thirty books, and Pompeii in seven more. The remaining fourteen use a number of locales in the Roman empire (and even beyond) as their principal setting, with Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Smyrna, Judea, Palmyra, Bithynia, Egypt, Africa, Spain, Gaul, Germany and Switzerland all appearing. One book, Philp Boast’s Son of Heaven even figures China as its location, as his hero, disgraced ex-senator Septimus Quistus, accompanies a twelve year old Chinese prince, who has fled to Rome in an attempt to avoid assassination, back to China, evading en route both a Hun army standing in their path and a group of Golden Head assassins. The majority of authors prefer to situate their sleuths firmly in a particular setting whether it be the city of Rome, fifth century Ravenna or late first

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century Eboracum (York). Those with the longest series, however, exploit the scope of their works by having their characters travel across the whole of the Roman Empire. Only a third of David Wishart’s books are set outside of Rome, but Lindsey Davis for example, sets half of her Falco books in the eternal city, and has the private eye travelling to Ostia and further afield to Britain, Palmyra, Alexandria, Spain, Africa and Greece, with a rough pattern of the locations alternating between Rome and abroad in consecutive books. John Maddox Roberts has eight of his SPQR novels set in Rome, with others taking place in Pompeii, Cyprus, Switzerland and Alexandria. Steven Saylor sets slightly more than half of his books in the city of Rome, but allows Gordianus to travel to Naples, Marseille, Egypt, Alexandria, Ephesus and even on a tour of the seven wonders of the ancient world on one occasion. Marilyn Todd set eight of her novels in Rome and five in different locations (Switzerland, Tuscany, Gaul and Sicily). Such diversity in setting obviously allows for variety and local colour to enliven the books, especially necessary in long running series. Even more than this, however, it overlaps with the genre of travel writing, a genre which in itself, it has been argued, attempts to recreate a picture of the unknown. Stacey Burton says of travel writing that as a genre it allows for an admixture of personal experience and cultural observation, historical storytelling and a political call to arms. Although it has ancient roots, over the past century it has evolved as a literary genre and a strategy for thinking through modernity, from the First World War to the present.35 Modern research sees such writing as a form of colonialism, legitimizing selfhood and highlighting otherness. Thus, Mary Baine Campbell writes, interest in travel writing—across a wide political spectrum—was part of the necessary reimagining of the world first occasioned by the postWorld War Two resistance movements and wars of liberation in the former European colonies as well as by the waves of immigration that followed…. Much of the work of observing, interpreting, articulating the explosion of that world, as well as the historical development of the imperialised world that led to it, was done through the recovery and analysis of people’s writings about ‘foreign and especially ‘exotic’ places in which they had travelled and lived.36 35  Stacey Burton, Travel Narrative and the Ends of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 2–3. 36  Mary Baine Campbell, “Travel Writing and its theory”, in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 261.

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Travel writing theorists have therefore raised questions concerning issues such as the portrayal of stereotypes, the subjective presence of the author, the way in which a reader identifies with the traveler and the indigenous population depicted in such works, and the consequent power role and status of both. 3

The Roman Sleuth

3.1 The Background: Policing Roman Society Roman society at all periods was highly hierarchical, albeit with a number of different, sometimes overlapping hierarchies. Not everyone was, of course, a citizen, especially outside of Italy, but even among citizens, status varied widely. The social rank of a citizen, patrician, plebeian and equestrian, was determined by birth and financial position, but status was dependent on a number of factors, including familial background, wealth, political power, attainment of honours and undertaking of public office. As Parkin and Pomeroy state: An essential feature of the Roman world is the importance of hierarchies: as there was no strong governmental intervention in daily life, it was essential to gain assistance from one’s peers and to facilitate patronage connections with those more powerful. The Roman senate and equestrian order were the most powerful groupings, and outside Rome the members of the upper classes, such as town councillors or even tribal chiefs, were assimilated to a similar status. These privileged few—probably less than 0.1 per cent of the population—dominated the vast majority beneath them. Yet all were subject to the power of the Emperor.37 Thus, the social elite were the senators, eques and the local politicians, with the Emperor in the position of patron to all those below him. Clearly, the higher echelons received far more prestige and wielded a huge amount of power, while the lower strata of professionals, artisans, craftsmen and businessmen were relatively without influence. Given this social background, the questions arises of who exactly was responsible for law and order and the detection of crime in Ancient Rome, and what was their social status? There was no formal police force as such in the Roman world; as Nippel stresses, the concept of an impartial organisation whose role is to guarantee and enforce public order, but which was functionally

37  Tim Parkin and Arthur Pomeroy, Roman Social History: A Sourcebook (London and NY: Routledge, 2007) 3.

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differentiated from the military forces, is a rather modern invention, reaching back only three hundred years. Indeed, the very notion that this function is the responsibility of the state rather than individual citizens was an idea foreign to the Romans.38 This does not mean that chaos reigned, however. As Fuhrmann points out: Leaders in the Roman empire had various means to stem the disorders they faced: community self-regulation, a well-developed tradition of civil law if that failed, the anxious supervision of local elites as a further safeguard, and, when necessary, the real threat of large-scale repercussions. Nevertheless, as he continues, “the absence of police in many episodes of disorder in the Roman Empire is striking”.39 There were no detectives and a very different perspective on crime, as reflected in the fact that Roman criminal law was also far more restrictive in scope than that of modern society.40 That is not to say, however, that there were no law enforcement roles. Although a force named the vigiles was created by Augustus as a fire brigade, it soon developed into a city police force, and where the vigiles were not able to manage, the Praetorian Guard and urban cohorts stepped in. Military personnel were also used in the provinces, both in the cities and rural areas, for tasks such as guarding the mints and food supplies, and arresting smugglers.41 There is also evidence that soldiers even “conducted plainclothed police investigations” and were involved in security work. Centurions and some decurions in security and border areas were “seconded to form a criminal investigation department”.42 Outside of formal policing, there is also the question of the Private Investigator, a job which also did not exist in the same way in the ancient world. There were, however, a number of professionals who carried out intelligence activities, especially within the military where the Praetorian Guard and tribunes in particular might be employed on such missions. Most prominently, the title speculator (later replaced by frumentarii), which seems to refer 38  Wilfried Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 1–2. 39  Fuhrmann, Policing the Roman Empire: Soldiers, Administration, and Public Order (Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press, 2012) 5. 40  Ibid., 96. 41  Rose Mary Sheldon, Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome: Trust in the Gods But Verify (London: Routledge, 2004) 154. 42  Ibid., 155.

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to the job of intelligence scout and spy,43 might take on such tasks.44 No doubt a patron might use his clients and contacts to discover information, but no formal occupation existed within the Roman world whose brief was to undertake investigations. 3.2 The Fictional Detectives 3.2.1 The Professional Private Eye Clearly then, a major challenge for the author of Roman detective fiction is how to adapt the genre to allow for the insertion of a figure that in the ancient world did not even exist. Despite this historical reality, some authors do create professional private investigators as well, most notably those from two of the earliest and longest running series, Lindsey Davis’ Marcus Didius Falco, succeeded in recent years by Flavia Albia, and Steven Saylor’s Gordianus the Finder. Falco describes himself as an informer, apparently translating the Latin delator.45 Two set in later antiquity also feature professionals of a different sort; Paul Doherty’s Claudia is a spy working for the Empress Helena, while Ben Pastor’s Aelius Spartianus is a historian in the court of Diocletian. The veracity sensed by the reader as a result of these occupations which enable the detective format to flow convincingly has surely contributed to the success of these novels. 3.2.2 The Upper Class Detective The majority of writers, however, do not follow this course, attempting to find a way to introduce a character who will institute such enquiries, a situation that is complicated by the hierarchical nature of Roman society, which would prevent easy access to characters of higher social rank in the Roman setting. The utilization of high class sleuths by some authors is, at least partially, a solution to this problem. Robert Colton’s impressively named Gaius Sempronius Gracchus Marcellus is an upper class wealthy young man; Marilyn Todd’s Marcus Cornelius Orbilio is also an aristocrat who serves as a foil to the main hero, Claudia Seforis; Marcus Flavius Severus, Alan Scribner’s hero is from the equestrian rank. All of these authors invent noble status for their detectives as a ploy to provide a convincing explanation for their ability to intervene with members 43  Sheldon (2004) 18. 44  Ibid., 165–7, 255. 45  Peter Hunt, “Lindsey Davis: Falco, Cynical Detective in a Corrupt Roman Empire”, in Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) 37.

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of society in cases where they have no official authority. Even where some such authority exists, because of the very nature of Roman society, the detective must be a member of the upper classes. Thus Scribner’s Marcus Flavius Severus, who is perhaps the closest thing to a professional sleuth, in that he is a “judge in the Court of the Urban Prefect”, is an eques. Seven other authors feature upper class characters as the detective, whether senators or wealthy Roman nobles. Philip Boast, Ron Burns, David Wishart, Marilyn Todd, Robert Colton, John Maddox Roberts and Alan Scribner all follow this route. One of the advantages of such a protagonist, as Terrance Lewis points out, talking about John Maddox Roberts’ late Republican Decius Caecilius Metellus, is ability to interact with important figures of history. As the son of a senator and member of an important plebeian family, his rank: allows Decius to be involved in political intrigue from the top down in Roman society … While Decius the Younger usually starts his involvement by investigating crime at the street level, every story leads him to political connections and conspiracies, better reflecting most of the sources we have for murder and general violence, as they highlight the political cases more often than they do what we more commonly consider the purely criminal.… Class position and power are parts of the nature of Decius Caecilius, and so he may use his share of the public power of Rome and his family (dignitas) or ignore it, depending on his needs.46 John Maddox Roberts is not alone in this approach. In Ron Burns’ (sometimes weak) books,47 it is actually in the depiction of the real historical characters, particularly Marcus Aurelius and Augustus, that the novels are most convincing. David Wishart even takes the name of a genuine historical figure from the first century CE, Valerius Marcus Corvinus, but fictionalizes him for the series. Depicted as a patrician connected by blood to the Imperial Julio-Claudian family, Corvinus, however, does not make his way up the cursus honorum, preferring to work as a private eye, and, in the words of one review “drinks his way through investigations that often bring him in contact with the ruling families, and the emperor of Rome”.48 46  Terrance L. Lewis (2000) 22. 47  Strikingly, Ron Burns has a high-born hero, but actually uses him in two distinct time periods. Livinius Severus appears in the reign of Marcus Aurelius in the first book (Roman Nights) but (with the addition of the praenomen Gaius) in the late republic in the second (Roman Shadows). 48   http://italophilebookreviews.blogspot.co.il/2014/10/finished-business-marcus-corvinus .html. (accessed 7 December 2015).

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This use of such high born characters who interact with real historical characters and events provides a plausible explanation for how the detective figure may operate in a world without professional crime solvers, but this is not just a matter of convenient access however. Ancient Rome in the popular imagination is a place of scandal and intrigue, where the wealthy aristocrats lounger around in togas and eating grapes, while indulging in poisoning, political intrigue and assassinations; the inclusion of well-known names such as Caesar, Cicero and the famous Roman emperors deepen the sense of recognition and place the reader more firmly in this world. Use of an aristocratic hero adds colour through the depiction of purple bordered tunics, orgies, scantily clad slaves and slave-owning tyrants, elements based upon the portrayal of ancient Rome in modern popular culture, where until very recently, lower class Romans (with the exception of slaves) were rarely portrayed. These books feed off, and contribute to, this tradition, drawing on the stereotypes in readers’ minds and providing an inbuilt and ready-made set of references and contexts within which the author can place the events of the story, as the detective unravels the details of the individual plots, which have an air of accuracy due to the factual and historical background against which they are set. There is one historical figure who seems to have appealed to more than one crime writers: two of the series, by Albert A. Bell Jr. and Bruce Macbain feature Pliny the Younger as protagonist. The use of a real person, as in the other cases, naturally adds a sense of verisimilitude, but the attraction goes deeper, as a result of the nature of Pliny himself, whose well-documented life and opinions, through his collected letters, lend an unusually personal insight into the career of an upper class Roman. In particular, his acute observations make him particularly suited to the role of detective, while his often pernickety comments seem to prompt images of an early Hercule Poirot in the mind of the reader. The attraction of the figure of Pliny is described by Bell, who explains: I’ve studied Pliny since I was in graduate school. About ten years ago I began to think of him as the kind of inquisitive, scientific person (by the standards of his day) who would make a good investigator. I have tried to be faithful to his way of thinking, as best I can fathom it from his letters.49 Macbain also explains his fascination with Pliny, stressing that his letters “reveal the public and private life of the Roman aristocracy as well as Pliny’s own wide-ranging interests and his personality—conscientious, tolerant,

49   http://www.pliny-mysteries.com/plinys-cases.html (accessed 7 December 2015).

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curious, vain, affectionate, occasionally self-serving”.50 Macbain’s affection for his hero shines through his description of him: He was a Roman senator and a lawyer with a successful, if not brilliant, career in the imperial administration. He was a landowner with a beautiful villa on the Italian coast. He was a literary dilettante. He was rather vain, rather fussy. At the same time, conscientious and honest. He was a very social animal with hundreds of friends and acquaintances across all classes. His most endearing qualities are his love for his young wife, Calpurnia, his generosity (he endowed a scholarship fund for the boys and girls of his home town), and his humanity towards his slaves and freedmen in an age when that was not common.51 Both authors then highlight Pliny for what they see as his qualities that make him attractive to the modern eye, a figure with whom they are able to identify, because of his scientific curiosity and enlightened values, but also relate to him in terms that might also be utilized in describing Agatha Christie’s famous Belgian sleuth. 3.2.3 Other Detectives Not all of the detectives in the Roman novels come from such exalted social positions, and in fact the novels display a wide range of backgrounds, with many heroes of a somewhat lower status, working men and women more in keeping with what in the western world is regarded as middle class. The employment of these ‘ordinary’ Romans provides a point of connection for the reader who is more easily able to identify with the issues of daily life as opposed to palace intrigues. Three of these more modestly connected sleuths are medical professionals; Ruth Downie’s Gaius Petrius Ruso, Albert Noyer’s Getorius Asterius, and Kelli Stanley’s Arcturus. The use of a medical professional also provides explanation and legitimacy for the investigation of a dead body, as well as overlapping with another popular genre, that of medical drama, with which detective fiction has much in common. Both doctor and detective must solve a puzzling mystery, whether it be murder or illness, through examination and deductive reasoning, and both are standard tropes of popular television. In the words of one study on the subject:

50   http://www.brucemacbain.com/plinys-world.php (accessed 7 December 2015). 51   http://www.brucemacbain.com/roman-mysteries-qa.php (accessed 7 December 2015).

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“Detective work” has long been a metaphor for clinical acumen … Both try to restore a status quo that has been undermined by a crime or disease. During their golden age, the two disciplines thrived on a climate of faith in the apparently unlimited capabilities of science and based their methods on deterministic interpretation of clues, signs, and symptoms.52 Another figure whose sleuthing abilities are connected to his profession is Rosemary Rowe’s hero, Libertus, who is a mosaicist, whose “pattern-maker’s mind” enables him to solve the crimes to which he is called. A freedman, who was previously an enslaved native Briton, his often awkward position in Romano-British society is a theme of the book, but one which also gives him an insight, and access, into both populations. Of even lower status is the wily Anthus of A.C. Tassie’s works, who starts out as an ambitious slave, before becoming freed by his master, Marco, Prefect of the Watch. All of these more humble detectives, with their streetwise knowledge and often sardonic attitudes as they suffer from the hard knocks of life, owe much to the wider crime fiction tradition, as the typify in many way the hard-boiled style detective so beloved of this genre. This tradition has been a major influence on Roman crime fiction, as I will now demonstrate. 3.3 The Hard-Boiled Roman Detective Several characteristics define the hard-boiled detective, one of the most prominent of which is humour, with the American “hardboiled” detectives of the 30s and 40s, witty, hard-bitten tough guys, with their raincoats and low-brimmed hats, delivering one-liners and wisecracks that are part of their charm.53 The gumshoe is not a clown, however, and has a serious side, as manifested in his marginality and air of being in conflict with authority. The traditional PI is a rebel, fighting against a world of wealth, corruption, and violence. He is usually on the outskirts of society, poor and with a shabby office, an ordinary man, rather than a brilliant eccentric with transcendent powers of deductive reasoning. Yet despite this ordinariness, this is also an unusual man, an antihero, who, as John Cawelti emphasizes, despite his apparent frustrations and cynical failures, is able to solve crimes and is sought after and essential to the rich and powerful. 52  Claudio Rapezzi, Roberto Ferrari, and Angelo Branzi, “White coats and fingerprints: diagnostic reasoning in medicine and investigative methods of fictional detectives”, BMJ 331 (2005) 1491–4. 53  See Earl F. Bargainnier, Comic Crime (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1987).

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Cawelti isolates two other aspects unique to the hard-boiled formula, namely “the subordination of the drama of solution to the detective’s quest for the discovery and accomplishment of justice”, and “a pattern of intimidation and temptation of the hero”. Both of these points are connected with the idea of justice and morality, which is a central feature of these detectives as Cawelti highlights: In many hard-boiled stories, the detective is given a mission—usually a deceptive one—which seemingly has little to do with murder and violence. Pursuing this mission, the detective happens upon the first of a series of murders that gradually reveal to him the true nature of his quest. In this way, the hard-boiled detective’s investigation becomes not simply a matter of determining who the guilty person is but of defining his own moral position.54 In these stories, the detective becomes not only investigator but judge, representing a somewhat natural and rough justice as he faces off against the criminal. The hardboiled detective was the most popular and successful strand of crime fiction in the nineteen thirties and forties. With the popularity of the genre, however, it rapidly descended into formulaic writing,55 and multiple sardonic PI’s flooded the market, becoming a cliché that was soon parodied, especially on screen.56 Over time, the humour that pervaded these novels died out, replaced by a far darker style, in which graphic crimes were depicted, and the hard boiled private eye gave way to the professional with the growth of police procedural books. Nevertheless, the Roman detective typically displays many of the qualities and defining characteristics of the gumshoe. The genre is epitomized by Lindsey Davis’ Falco, who is a wry observer of society in Vespasian Rome. Like many novels of the genre, the books are told in the first person, and the voice of the somewhat disreputable and sharply cynical Falco is one of the greatest strengths of the books. Although Falco’s social status rises over the course of the books, he retains his sardonic attitude and represents the ordinary 54  John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) 146. 55  Detective fiction itself is often viewed as the most formulaic of popular forms of fictional contemporary writing. See Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of SelfConscious Fiction (London and NY: Methuen. New Accents, 1984) 82. 56  See e.g. Woody Allen, Play it Again, Sam; Steve Martin, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.

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man struggling against the vagaries of life, and, in keeping with Cawelti’s definitions, the books are more about the development of his character than with solving an elusive crime. In particular, the wide range of supporting characters, from Helena Justina to his sprawling and colourful Italian family to his best friend Petronius Longus of the Vigiles, are portrayed with an infusion of humour that adds much to the series. This is a somewhat moderated and toned down gumshoe, but the nature of the stereotype is clear. Thus, as one review put it, these works are a “creative twist on classic hard-boiled detective novels” with an “appealing, wisecracking, self-deprecating detective (in a toga rather than a fedora) whose bravado conceals both a tender heart and an intolerance for injustice”.57 Marcus Didius Falco is the most outstanding example of the hard-boiled Roman detective, but other instances abound. John Maddox Roberts’s Decius Caecilius Metullus the Younger is a patrician, and far more well connected than Falco, but shares his cynical view of the world; the books are peppered by sardonic comments such as “in Rome honest building contractors are as common as volunteer miners in the Sicilian sulphur pits.”58 Steven Saylor’s Gordianus is a rather darker figure, but he also has a caustic perspective, particularly of those in power, and there are occasional acerbically witty comments in these books too. The mosaicist, Libertus, by Rosemary Rower has a less sarcastic attitude and rather whimsical humour, but these qualities are still definitely there. David Wishart also makes his detective, Corvinus, such a character, with his ironic comments and cynical takes on Rome. The Arcturus books by Kelli Stanley are even marketed under the description, “Roman Noir. Featuring Arcturus, a hardboiled protagonist in the best Philip Marlowe tradition”.59 Why is the gumshoe detective, then, such an attractive figure for the writer of Roman crime fiction, and why has he proved particularly popular in recent decades? A key component in the answer to this question lies in the centrality of the city to the hard-boiled genre. As Cawelti stresses, “One of the most important aspects of the hard-boiled formula is the special role of the modern city as background”, and in this city, “we find empty modernity, corruption, and death. A gleaming and deceptive facade hides a world of exploitation and

57  Shelle Rosenfeld, “Silver Pigs”, Booklist (1 May 2000) 1608. 58  John Maddox Roberts, “Mightier than the Sword” in Mike Ashley, ed., The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1993) 29. 59   h ttp://www.amazon.com/Dormienda-Night-Sleeping-Arcturus-Mystery-ebook/dp/ B0050CM06U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450776847&sr=8-1&keywords=nox+dormienda (accessed 22 December 2015).

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criminality”.60 Thus, hard-boiled fiction takes place in decidedly less than salubrious surroundings, whose hero was closely linked however to the cowboy of the Westerns: Hard-boiled fiction translated the romanticism of the Western into a modern urban setting, and this movement from the Western frontier to a hostile urban environment was accompanied by an abrupt shift from the artificial gentility of the classical detective story to the creation of a fictional world of social corruption and ‘real’ crime.61 In this environment, the hard-boiled investigator is “a tough, independent, often solitary figure, a descendant of the frontier hero and cowboy but, as reimagined in the 1920s, a cynical city-dweller”.62 If we apply this aspect of the genre to the depiction of ancient Rome in popular culture, particularly on screen, striking parallels are immediately obvious. Traditionally the Eternal City was depicted in a specific way, full of gleaming white marble columns and statues, mosaics, inlaid pools, gilded couches, togas, eagles and scarlet cloaks, a contrived version that bore little relation to the reality of the classical world, particularly in the idealized cleanliness and sanitized appearance of screen antiquity. With growing awareness of the unrealistic nature of this depiction, a grittier Rome began to appear on screen from Richard Lester’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) onwards.63 Excavations since the nineteen sixties at Pompeii, combined with greater access to international travel, brought the ancient city, in all its grimy detail, to the fore of public imagination, and this city began to be the inspiration for depictions of urban life in the ancient world. Thus, the production designer of the HBO-BBC series Rome, Joseph Bennett, explained: People think of Rome as white and cold and beautiful, powerful but distant. But … Rome was like Pompeii, but much bigger. And Rome was so noisy it was impossible to sleep. It was like hell. Think of it as a 60  See also John Scaggs, “The modern city is generally recognised as the normal setting for hard-boiled fiction”, Crime Fiction (Oxford: Routledge, 2005) 50. 61  Ibid., 57. 62  Lee Horsley: The Noir Thriller (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001) 19. 63  See Lisa Maurice, “Building a New Ancient Rome in STARZ Spartacus”, in Antony Agoustakis and Monica Cyrino, STARZ Spartacus: Reimagining an Icon on Screen (Edinburgh: Edin­ burgh University Press, 2016) 111–130.

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combination of New York and Calcutta, with insane wealth and insane poverty. It was pretty extreme.64 Such portrayals of ancient Rome as a grubby, turbulent urban society, peopled by vast numbers of poor and controlled by wealthy and often corrupt politicians, are markedly similar to the environment of the hard-boiled detective novels, and help account for the coincidence of genre and setting. In fact, Paul Doherty states this specifically as a reason for the attraction of Rome to the crime fiction writer: Ancient Rome is a brilliant setting for detective fiction because of what I call, “the theory of contrasts.” The theory of contrasts in detective fiction is when you have a place and a time which includes both extremes of the spectrum.… Rome falls into this theory: the glorious city, the centre of Empire which housed great philosophers such as Seneca, Cicero and noble emperors like Hadrian. But Ancient Rome was also the Rome of the gladiator, the filthy slums and mad emperors such as Caligula or Nero. Rome offers the writer a rich tapestry, a veritable mine of nuggets, descriptions and experiences.65 Another contributing factor to the choice of the ancient world for the setting for these novels is the macho nature of the hero. Traditionally, he is a white male who is strong, brave, independent and tough, a popular formula in American society.66 This is stressed by author Laurence Block: The private eye is a special figure in American mythology. It’s a staple of the myth that he should be a cynical loner, a man at odds with society and its values. That’s not something women normally relate to. Women aren’t cynical loners—that’s not how they like to work.67

64  Winner, David. (January 28, 2005). “A blow to the temples.” Financial Times, available online at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/95ca7faa-702f-11d9-b572-00000e2511c8.html (accessed 23 December 2015). 65  In email correspondence with the author, 21.9.15. 66  See Anne Cranny-Francis, “Gender and Genre: Feminist Rewritings of Detective Fiction”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 11 (1988) 69. 67  Quoted in a review by Marilyn Stasio, “Lady Gumshoes: Boiled less hard. New York Times Book Review, (April 28, 1985) 38, and cited by Cranny-Francis, ibid.

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Writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, these values seem very dated and out of place. One way in which to solve the glaring incompatibility between such attitudes and modern susceptibilities is to place the detective in a society that was known to treat women differently. Situating him in ancient Rome makes the creation of a hard-boiled figure far less problematic. Even so, the Roman gumshoe is often toned down somewhat in this respect. Heather Worthington remarks with regard to Lindsey Davis’ works, “Falco is a variation of the hard-boiled detective with the misogyny removed and the cynicism moderated”.68 3.4 The Female Roman Gumshoe Toning down the misogyny in order to accommodate contemporary concerns is not enough for some writers, however. Despite the fact that Laurence Block felt strongly that the role of hard-boiled detective must be played by a man, declaring, “It seems to me that if they want to go into the profession seriously, women writers will have to change the myth itself, instead of trying to fit themselves into it”,69 some writers have utilized female detective figures in these books. This might at first seem an impossible task; if freedom of movement and access is difficult for a lower class male hero, how much more complicated is it when the detective is a woman, whose role was more limited in ancient Rome? Martha Marks, one of the writers who has followed this path, chose a female heroine in a conscious move to present what she sees as a fuller picture of Roman culture. Writing of the recent trend, whereby novels starring firstcentury Roman women have started to appear, and explaining her own interest in such fiction, Marks states that these books: spotlight strong female protagonists who not only refuse to stay quietly in the background but aggressively step forward to control their destinies.… This is a good new phase of modern literature. Books with such characters will appeal more to today’s women (and to many men as well). And since the lives of first-century women undoubtedly were interesting in their own ways, they deserve to be told … even if we authors have to piece together details from what few archeological, literary, and historical sources we have. It’s like collecting bits of cloth to stitch into a beautiful quilt.70 68  Worthington (2011) 138. 69  Stasio and Cranny-Francis, ibid. 70   http://hfebooks.com/the-hand-that-rocked-the-roman-cradle/ (accessed 13 December 2015).

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While a strong female lead may be attractive to female readers, and indeed a necessary point of identification in the twenty-first century, it does create difficulties within the ancient setting, where the author must find a way for the heroine to attain a believable level of freedom with which to operate. Marks’ own solution is to make her main character, Theodosia Varro, an enormously wealthy heiress, who has inherited a huge estate in Rome upon the death of her half-brother. This somewhat unlikely, albeit not entirely impossible scenario, provides Theodosia with an unusual amount of freedom and power, but also enables Marks to highlight social issues, such as the pressure to marry, the consequences of so doing in the Roman setting, as well Theodosia’s relationships with the representative of different social strata, and in particular, her slaves. The other creators of female detectives place them, perhaps more realistically, in rather lower social strata, and find other ways in which to explain their relative liberty of action. Jane Finnis’ sleuth, Aurelia Marcella, is a female British innkeeper, an occupation that allows her freedom of movement and the ability to interact with a wide range of people. Similarly, Paul Doherty’s Claudia is the niece of a local tavern keeper, at least in public; secretly, however, she is an imperial spy, a member of a group Doherty names the agentes in rebus.71 Both personae give Claudia access to the full range of members of society, from Christian priests to gladiators, and from the Imperial family to actors, and prostitutes. As with her Falco books, Lindsey Davis’ novels solve the problem, not by utilizing a scenario that would enable her heroine access to different levels of society, but by continuinng the conceit of the existence of the private eye figure with the creation of Flavia Albia, the most recent hero from her pen.72 Flavia Albia is a young widow, the adopted British daughter of Falco and Helena, who has been a private investigator for several years, following in her adopted father’s footsteps. Davis justifies her assigning such a career to Flavia Albia on the grounds that women in Rome “could have jobs, within certain limited circumstances. Women could run businesses if they were brave enough and strong enough to do it”. She argues that what Albia does as an investigator 71  The agentes in rebus were couriers and agents in the late Roman imperial period, and although Doherty’s dating (313 CE onwards) slightly precedes the first mention of these functionaries (in 319), they may have been in existence from the late third century. The agentes in rebus replaced the frumentarii mentioned above n. 30. See Glen Warren Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar, Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999) 278–9. 72  For a detailed examination of the Flavia Albia books, see Anat Koplowitz-Breier’s article in this volume.

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“is acceptable, in that she works often for women”, and although she acknowledges that Albia “has limitations and it is interesting to talk about how it is more difficult for a woman to go about in society and talk to people”,73 this aspect does not always shine through so clearly, and the Albia books are less convincing historically than the Falco series. Davis attempts to explain Albia’s behaviour, which is often at odds with norms of Roman society, by her status as a native Briton, a factor which enables her to comment on a society of which she is not a full member. Thus, according to Davis’ website, these books feature “the often caustic Albia giving us her refreshing new perspective on the traditional Roman world from the viewpoint of a woman and an outsider”,74 a fact she herself stresses: “[Albia’s] viewing all the things that we know from an outsider’s point of view, so she can be skeptical about Rome and its traditions and its society, whereas Falco, although he thinks that he’s very cynical, actually he is at heart trying to be a good traditional Roman”.75 Another way of dealing with the more restricted role of the woman in ancient society is to make the female part of a detective duo. As Muller and Pronzini point out, fictional characters who work together in a variety of ways to solve a mystery have been a staple of the crime-fiction genre since its inception.76 In most cases of Roman fiction, this involves a husband and wife team, one of the most popular forms of detective duos, which reached its peak of popularity in the 1940s and 1950s.77 With the growth of feminism and the rise in status of women, the acceptability of strong female figures reduced the need for such legitimation of the female detective and these fictional partnerships became less popular, but with regard to the ancient world, the old constraints still apply. Thus Albert Noyer’s sleuthing couples are two husband and wife teams, Treverius and Blandina, and Getorius Asterius and Arcadia, while Lindsey Davis expands her Falco novels to include Helena Justina, Falco’s first girlfriend, then wife, as a central figure in the investigations. Similarly, Flavia Albia is, now in the third book of the series, acquiring a partner, who is both fellow investigator and love interest. Early in the first of Ruth Downie’s Medicus novels, the doctor Gaius Petrius Ruso rescues and purchases an abused slave girl named Tilla, who then becomes his lover and eventual wife as the books progress. Marilyn Todd’s Claudia, a low born ex-prostitute who inherits her 73  https://soundcloud.com/audibleuk/lindsey-davis-on-enemies-at. 74  http://www.lindseydavis.co.uk/publications/ (accessed 13 December 2015). 75  https://soundcloud.com/audibleuk/lindsey-davis-on-enemies-at. 76  Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini, Detective Duos: The Best Adventures of Twenty-Five CrimeSolving Twosomes (Oxford: OUP 1997) 3. 77  Ibid., 135.

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wine merchant husband’s wealth and business upon his death, is pursued by the patrician Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, an investigator with the Imperial Security Police, and with whom she solves the mysteries. In all of these series apart from those by Noyer the love affairs progress over the course of the books, adding a romantic chase element to the works, and another strand as the relationships develop and expand. Conclusions Clearly, the Roman crime fiction novels that have developed into such a recognisable sub-genre find their roots in the hard-boiled detective fiction of the twentieth century, due to an identification of ancient Rome with the huge and corrupt life of the American city, complete with all its seediness and danger. The size and scope of the Roman period also provides a wide range of possibilities for the writer, allowing for originality and variation, even within the genre. Similarly, the geographic range of the Empire allows for settings in exotic locations, which provide another layer of interest, even while the conservatism of writers shows through in the presentation of these elements as exotic, when described from the point of view of the Roman, with whom the reader identifies so strongly. Such an identification owes much to modern popular conceptions of Rome on screen, which in themselves differ so much from the earlier depictions of epic movies; the Roman sleuths of the twenty-first century could not, I would suggest, have appeared in the 1960s, when the classical world was regarded so differently. Such a sense of association between the ancient and modern worlds overrides the difficulties inherent in setting a plot at this period, when slavery was part of everyday life, and women’s roles very different. These differences cause the authors to be creative in devising ways in which to present their detectives in a manner that will attract rather than alienate the reader. That they have done so, and continue to do so, in such large numbers, is testimony to the fascination that the ancient Roman world still exerts in the world today. Bibliography Andrea, William L. De, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television (New York: Macmillan, 1994). Baker, Jennifer S., The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Historical Fiction (Chicago: ALA editions, 2015).

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Bargainnier, Earl F., Comic Crime (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1987). Browne, Ray B. and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). Burton, Stacey, Travel Narrative and the Ends of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Campbell, Mary Baine, “Travel Writing and its theory”, in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Cothran, Casey and Mercy Cannon, New Perspectives on Detective Fiction: Mystery Magnified (London: Routledge, 2015). Cranny-Francis, Anne, “Gender and Genre: Feminist Rewritings of Detective Fiction”, Women’s Studies International Forum 11 (1988) 69. Cyrino, Monica, Rome Season One: History Makes Television (Malden MA: WileyBlackwell, 2009). Fuhrmann, Christopher J., Policing the Roman Empire: Soldiers, Administration, and Public Order (Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press, 2012). Groot, Jerome de, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2010). Horsley, Lee, The Noir Thriller (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001). Hunt, Peter, “Lindsey Davis: Falco, Cynical Detective in a Corrupt Roman Empire”, in Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) 32–44. Johnson, Sarah L., Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre (Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2005). Kittredge, William and Steven M. Krauzer, The Great American Detective (New York: Mentor, 1978) i–xxxiv. Lewis, Terrance L., “John Maddox Roberts and Steven Saylor: Detecting in the Final Decades of the Roman Republic”, in Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) 22–31. Lukács, George, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1962). Maurice, Lisa, “Building a New Ancient Rome in STARZ Spartacus”, in Antony Agoustakis and Monica Cyrino (eds.), STARZ Spartacus: Reimagining an Icon on Screen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) 111–130. Maxwell, Richard, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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Muller, Marcia, and Bill Pronzini, Detective Duos: The Best Adventures of Twenty-Five Crime-Solving Twosomes (Oxford: OUP 1997). Nippel, Wilfried, Public Order in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Parkin, Tim and Arthur Pomeroy, Roman Social History: A Sourcebook (London and NY: Routledge, 2007). Phillpott, Matthew J., A Novel Approaches Prelude: A Brief History of Historical Fiction, https://ihrconference.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/mphillpott-history-of-historicalfiction.pdf (accessed 11 November 2015). Picker, Lenny, “Mysteries of History”, Publishers Weekly (May 3 2010). http://www .publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-announcements/article/ 43024-mysteries-of-history.html (accessed 18 November 2015). Priestman, Martin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Rapezzi, Claudio, Roberto Ferrari, and Angelo Branzi, “White coats and fingerprints: diagnostic reasoning in medicine and investigative methods of fictional detectives”, BMJ 331 (2005) 1491–4. Roberts, John Maddox, “Mightier than the Sword” in Mike Ashley (ed.), The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1993) 68–85. Rosenfeld, Shelle, “Silver Pigs”, Booklist (1 May 2000) 1608. Rousselot, Elodie, “Historical Fiction”, in Brian W. Shaffer (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) 174. Rousselot, Elodie, Exoticizing the Past in Neo-Historical Fiction (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). Saylor, Steven, “All Roads Led to Rome”, Mystery Readers Journal, Historical Mysteries I, 9.2, (Summer 1993). Scaggs, John, Crime Fiction (Oxford: Routledge, 2005). Shaffer, Brian W. (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2011). Sheldon, Rose Mary, Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome: Trust in the Gods But Verify (London: Routledge, 2004). Stasio, Marilyn, “Lady Gumshoes: Boiled less hard”, New York Times Book Review, (April 28, 1985) 38. Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London and NY: Methuen. New Accents, 1984). Winks, Robin, Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1980). Winks, Robin, Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence (New York: Harper Collins, 1968).

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Winner, David, “A blow to the temples.” Financial Times, (January 28, 2005), available online at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/95ca7faa-702f-11d9-b572-00000e2511c8.html (accessed 23 December 2015). Worthington, Heather, Key Concepts in Crime Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Young, Samantha, “Based on a True Story: Contemporary Historical Fiction and Historiographical Theory”, Otherness: Essays and Studies 2.1 August 2011 (http:// www.otherness.dk/fileadmin/www.othernessandthearts.org/Publications/Journal_ Otherness/Otherness__Essays_and_Studies_2.1/1._Samantha_Young.pdf) (accessed 30.11.2015).

CHAPTER 2

A Roman and a Foreigner: Lindsey Davis’s New Roman Detective Series Anat Koplowitz-Breier 1 Introduction In his preface to The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction, Robin Winks argues that mystery and detective novels are the most popular fiction in the English-speaking world, with the historical mystery becoming particularly prevalent.1 While the factors behind the latter’s rise to prominence are not easy to ascertain, the historical mystery combines two elements—history and crime/detective work. In the guise of the former, it “generally covers adventures of all kinds and deals with all aspects of culture”; as the latter, it “is concerned with the major drives of human life as highlighted by Margaret Atwood’s ‘crime and punishment’ and ‘sin and retribution’ ”.2 Thus at the same time as being exposed to the past the reader also deals with everyday life and situations, historical crime fiction adducing the “past up to the present through the device of timeless crime … while at the same time retaining the atmosphere of the historical period”.3 This article focuses on Lindsey Davis’ new Roman detective series, which in some ways constitutes a sequel to her Falco series. As we shall see, the two series differ in their detective characterization, however—male vs. female, Roman vs. foreigner. Lindsey Davis’ first Roman detective novel, The Silver Pigs, starring the ‘informer’ Marcus Didius Falco, was published in 1989. As she observed in 2004: 1  Robin W. Winks, “Preface”, in R.B. Browne and L.A. Kreiser, Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 2000) ix. 2  Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, “Introduction”, in R.B. Browne and L.A. Kreiser, Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 2000) 2. 3  Ray B. Browne, “David Wishart: Democratizing Roman Culture through Crime Fiction”, in R.B. Browne and L.A. Kreiser, Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction II (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) 1, 3.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004346383_004

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Falco began as something of a joke: would it be possible to place a fortiesstyle private eye two thousand years ago? Rome at that time seemed an ideal alternative to the big metropolitan settings of so many ‘gumshoe’ novels— a huge, dangerous, colourful city that saw itself as the centre of the world. It was full of characters on the make—and really did have men called ‘informers’, who hid behind pillars listening for information they could sell, or who actually took people to court in order to receive compensation like modern ‘ambulance chasers’.4 The Falco books take place during the reign of the Emperor Vespasian (69–79 c.e.), Falco frequently working on his behalf or that of the empire in Rome and its provinces. The final book in the series so far (#20), Nemesis, was published in 2010 and takes place in 77 c.e. As the series progresses, Falco rises from his plebian origins to equestrian rank, becoming Procurator of the Sacred Geese of Juno—“one of a hundred thousand meaningless honours handed out by the Emperor when he owned someone a favour and was too mean to pay in cash. Vespasian reckoned my services had cost enough, so he settled up remaining debts with a joke”.5 In 2013, three years after the last book in the original series appeared, Davis began a new series entitled Falco: The Next Generation. This has a new protagonist—Flavia Albia, Falco’s adopted daughter. The subtitle Falco: The Next Generation only appears in The Ides of April, however, the first book in the new series; the second (Enemies at Home), the third (Deadly Election), and the fourth (The Graveyard of the Hesperides) declare them to be Flavia Albia Novels.6 The subtitle the first volume bears is most likely a function of the fact that it serves as an introduction to the new series, providing some of the facts that the reader of the new series needs to know about Flavia Albia’s role as an informer and the series’ link with the previous series. Like Falco in the first series, Flavia Albia serves as the narrator in the second, giving the novels the feel of American hard-boiled detective fiction, whose primary feature—particularly in Raymond Chandler’s oeuvre—is the detective narrating the story in his own voice. Many of the critics of this genre argue that 4  Http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/1017/ lindsey-davis. 5  Lindsey Davis, The Jupiter Myth (London: Arrow, 2003) 3. 6  Lindsey Davis, The Ides of April (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013); eadem, Enemies at Home (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014); eadem, Deadly Election (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015); eadem, The Graveyard of the Hesperides (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2016).

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the detective typically has ‘two voices’—his public voice, in which he speaks to suspects, and his ‘private’ voice, with which he addresses the reader. As John Scaggs observes, he “has two voices, and each voice reveals a side to the private eye that is incompatible with the other”.7 In the Flavia Albia series, this phenomenon is striking, the distinction between her two voices being very sharp. When speaking to other characters in the story, Flavia Albia comes across as tough and calculated, only revealing her feelings and thoughts to the reader. Imperial Rome forms another link with the American hard-boiled detective novel. As Peter Hunt notes: The world of detective novels is not merely a different world that requires explanation. It is often a fallen and deceptive place that the detective must unveil. To begin with, the genre requires a crime, immorality, ruthlessness, and, most important, false appearance. The Roman Empire has special attractions to an author trying to evoke this atmosphere.… We could be in the “The Big Sleep” or “Chinatown”. Rome is a detective world.8 While both series are set on the “mean streets” of Rome, in Raymond Chandler’s phrase, they differ notably in several respects. One of the most prominent of these is the fact that Falco and Flavia Albia are family wo/men rather than the lone detectives of the hard-boiled detective tradition, of whom he says, “He lives alone, in rented flats or houses. He works alone, in a cheap, comfortless office. He drinks and smokes a lot: a single, masculine life style.… In general, he has dropped right out of the normal family.”9 Family plays a prominent role in both the series. Falco is a family man, Helena Justina serving as his unofficial assistant. As a young widow, Flavia Albia depends on her family more than she would like to admit, many of her professional affairs arising in part due to her family ties (her uncles, for example). In contrast to the hardboiled American detective who is basically a ‘loner’, Davis’s detectives are therefore never really solitary figures. As we shall see below, however, Flavia Albia’s place in society more closely resembles the lonely ‘hardboiled’ detective than does Falco’s. According to 7  John Scaggs, Crime Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2005) 61. 8  Peter Hunt, “Lindsey Davis: Falco, Cynical Detective in a Corrupt Roman Empire”, in R.B. Browner and L.A. Kreiser, Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 2000) 32. 9   Stephen Knight, “ ‘A Hard Cheerfulness’: An Introduction to Raymond Chandler”, in B. Docherty (ed.), American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) 78.

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John Cawelti, the hard-boiled detective is a man who “must reject the public ideals and values of society and seek to create his own personal code of ethics and his own set of values”.10 In Flavia Albia’s case, her position as a woman in patriarchal Rome compels her to find numerous ways to establish her unique ‘place in society’. As Peter Hunt notes, the Falco novels fall into a variety of modern genres— secret service agents à la James Bond, police novels, and the classical detective genre (the latter in his view including the hard-boiled detective novel and Agatha Christie’s whodunits).11 The Flavia Albia series not yet having been concluded, we cannot predict all the types of genres it will cover. We do know that it is not likely to fall into the secret-agent-performing-for-the-Emperor category, Flavia Albia telling us in The Ides of April that, in contrast to her father, she works for neither Emperor nor state: “I never worked for the state. I had relatives who had done so in the past, but it was now too dangerous” (65). This is likely to remain true in light of the historical background, Vespasian— the emperor in Falco series—being regarded as a good emperor: “When I first came to Rome it was the reign of the Emperor Vespasian, tough but decent” (63).12 In the new series, however, Domitian has come to power; this emperor, as Suetonius tells us, being cut from a very different cloth: In his administration of the government he for some time showed himself inconsistent, with about an equal number of virtues and vices, but finally he turned the virtues also into vices; for so far as one may guess, it was contrary to his natural disposition that he was made rapacious through need and cruel through fear.13 Flavia Albia herself describes the atmosphere in Rome in her day: For someone like me, who worked among deceivers and doublecrossers, the new atmosphere of dread was an appropriate backdrop. We had reached a grim period when Domitian was clearly becoming more cruel.… The more he executed people who showed their hostility, and the feebler his excuses, the less our charmless tyrant would be loved … Neither he nor we could escape the cycle of misery. (64–65) 10  John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) 161. 11  Hunt (2000) 33–34. 12  Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the novel refer to The Ides of April. 13  Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004) 314.

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Another factor that added to the terror was the activity of the Praetorian Guards, whom Domitian employed as his executioners—‘pitiless men’ and ‘trained killers’—whose presence became such a fact of life that people had become accustomed to living in fear: “We were used to the execution squads. That was the worst part; we now accepted it” (64). Although Flavia Albia does not work for the state, she does cooperate with the aediles and vigiles—the local Roman ‘law enforcement agencies’.14 The Ides of April deals with a series of unexplained deaths whose existence none of the magistrates is initially willing to admit. Eventually, they agree to work with Flavia Albia to solve the crimes. In Enemies at Home, the aedile Manlius Faustus, whom we meet in the first book, asks for Flavia Albia’s help in solving the deaths of a couple. In Deadly Election, she again works closely with the aedile—Manlius Faustus— when a corpse found in her father’s auction house appears to be linked to the upcoming political election, one of the candidates for which he supports. The same is true of The Graveyard of the Hesperides, in which she collaborates with the aedile to solve the mystery of a series of bodies that keeping appearing in the garden of the bar he is renovating. 2

Flavia Albia as Other

As a woman, Flavia Albia is distinct from all other informers in Rome because she is a member of de Beauvoir’s ‘second sex’, her situation as a woman thus being defined as Other: “Now, what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she—a free and autonomous being like all human creatures— nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other”.15 The fact that Flavia Albia lives in patriarchal Roman Empire, with its sharp distinction between different classes and genders, makes her position as a working woman from the equestrian order even more distinct and Other.16 Flavia Albia is not the first hardboiled female detective, of course. Although at the beginning of the genre only male detectives existed, female hard-boiled 14  Benjamin Kelly, “Crime, Law, and Order”, in M. Gibbs, M. Nikolic, and P. Ripat (eds.), Themes in Roman Society and Culture (Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2014) 241–258. See also the chapter by Lisa Maurice in this volume. 15  Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (trans. H.M. Parshley; London: Jonathan Cape, 1956) 27. 16  Judith Hallett, “Women as Same and Other in Classical Roman Elite”, Helios, 16.1 (1989) 59–78.

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detectives arrived on the scene with Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone (1977), Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone in the 1980s.17 As Kenneth Paradis observes, the introduction of women was not an easy task: because, as Paretsky recognized, giving the hard-boiled detective a female body fundamentally complicates the web of associations that legitimate his patterns of action, attributes of character, and relations to his world; it disrupts the genre’s association of masculinity. (86)18 The shift from the masculine realm to the female is even more radical, constituting a change in what Bethany Ogden calls a ‘hard-boiled ideology’ that mandates that the detective be a white American male.19 As a woman, the female detective is the embodiment of the marginalized Other. This is what allows the female detective to fight for justice without needing to justify herself. As Sandra Tomc notes, the idea that the system—government, law courts, police etc.—is patriarchal and abuses women and minorities enables the detective to find “her political purpose in the rejection of institutional and organized authority”.20 In Flavia Albia’s case, however, her otherness derives from numerous other factors. The first, of course, is that she is a female informer. In Enemies at Home, the second book in the series, she states, “As for me, I was a private investigator. Don’t point out it’s an unusual job for a woman; after twelve years, I had heard that enough times” (9). This is an allusion, of course, to P.D. James’ well-known novel An Unsuitable Job for A Woman (1972), whose protagonist inherits her boss’s detective agency. Like Cordelia Gray, Flavia Albia may well have inherited her job from her father. The final book in the Falco series takes place in 77 c.e., the first of the Flavia Albia series in 89 c.e., when she has been an informer/investigator for twelve years. She even claims she learnt her profession from her father, the best informer in Rome: “My father was a private informer too, and according to some (him, for example), he was the best in Rome. I was trained to take my chance, to open doors, to look around” (10). 17  Silke Friedrich, Queens of Crime—American and British Female Detective Novels over the Course of Time (Hamburg: Anchor, 2012). 18  Kenneth Paradis, “Warshawski’s Situation: Beauvoirean Feminism and the Hard-Boiled Detective”, South Central Review, 18.3–4 (2001) 86–101. 19  Bethany Ogden, “Hard-boiled Ideology”, Critical Quarterly, 34.1(1992) 71–87. 20  Sandra Tomc, “Questing Women: The Feminist Mystery after Feminism”, in Glenwood Irons (ed.), Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995) 47.

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Falco’s and Flavia Albia’s business nonetheless differ. When Nepos asks her precisely what her work as an informer entails in the Ides of April, she details her career history: I gave him my professional biography. I stressed the mundane side: chasing runaway adolescents for anxious parents, routine hunts for missing birth certificates or army discharge diplomas, or for missing heirs, or missing chickens that naughty neighbours had already cooked up in tarragon … I mentioned other aspects of my strangely mixed portfolio. The time I investigated the quack doctor who raped female patients after giving them sleeping draughts. How I sometimes eliminated innocent suspects from vigils enquiries, when our fair-minded lawmen went for an easy option, regardless of proof. Then there was work I did occasionally for the Camillus brothers, two rising prosecution lawyers who might need a woman’s assistance when they were gathering evidence. “Impressed?” “You work mainly for women?” “I do”. Female clients trusted me. They shied off male informers, who had a reputation for groping and worse indecency. Besides, many male informers were simply no good. (27) Flavia Albia’s interest lying in everyday crimes rather than murder, she declares that the majority of her client are female. In fact, however, much of her work involves both murder and male clients. Reflecting on the nature of her profession, she remarks: “Informers deal in hopelessness at every level” (18). She also explains why she decided to continue working after being widowed: I continued to work because finding solutions to problems had a logical appeal.… You need goals, when you have already had all your joy and expect destiny to grant nothing further. (35–36) For Flavia Albia, being an informer is not merely a profession but gives meaning to life after the loss of her beloved husband in an unfortunate accident (only fully explained in the third book). It also suits her curious and quickwitted character. Despite working with the municipal authorities, she has to fight for recognition as a woman. This is particularly evident in The Ides of April, the vigiles only agreeing to meet her on the basis of her reputation: “I would hardly have counted here, but for a lucky breakthrough on an old inquiry: my own reputation rested on that time I exposed a doctor who drugged his women

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patients and then interfered with them” (76). She makes various attempts to meet the aedile several times without success (to the best of her knowledge, at least: she in fact meets him unwittingly, not knowing who he is). She only becomes persona grata when he needs her female assistance and has been persuaded of her competence. Flavia Albia is also an independent woman—a very unusual status in Rome, where women were always some form of under male authority: In ancient Rome, virtually all free Roman women were under one of the following three types of legal authority: patria potestas (‘paternal power’), manus (subordination to a husband’s legal power), or tutela (‘guardianship’).… By the reign of Augustus, manus had practically disappeared, and Augustus himself weakened tutela mulierum.… Patria potestas, however, survived until the end of antiquity …21 In Flavia Albia’s case, her legal guardian is her father, who holds the power of patria potestas: “On principle I asked, would he send for my father then, since he was my male head of household, who ought to speak for me legally?” While appealing to law here, Flavia Albia elsewhere exploits it to suits her purposes. In Enemies at Home, when her uncles claim to be her in loco parentis as she talks to the aedile, she retorts that they “aren’t fit to be in loco to a worm!”, also reacting facetiously to the three other candidates suggested—a Bithynian freedman, a banker, and a priest: “My father holds the traditional view that any woman without a father or husband should be placed in the care of a lecherous fraud with his filthy eyes on her money—as if my sisters and I couldn’t fritter away our property for ourselves” (20). The aedile responds to this with the remark that: “I imagine Flavia Albia can run rings around the guardian system” (21). Although she legally falls under male authority, Flavia Albia is thus virtually independent, especially being responsible for her own financial affairs. While Flavia Albia is usually—but not always respectfully—law-abiding, this does not prevent her from being unconventional. She lives by herself in an apartment her father occupied as a young man and which was her married home before being prematurely widowed at the age of 20 after three years of happy marriage. Although widows were expected to remarry in the early Empire, she responds to Andronicus’ comment on her unmarried state as they discuss Viator’s widow, whom they expect to remarry, by asserting: “I was a

21  Judith Evans Grubbs, Women and the Law in the Roman Empire (London/New York: Routledge, 2002) 20.

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breakaway character” (177).22 In the fourth book of the series, however, she agrees to marry Faustus, despite feeling the step to be unnecessary: “Another fine concept in Roman law is that it simply defines marriage as an agreement by two people to live together” (The Graveyard of the Hesperides, 12). The couple already living together, the whole concept of wedding ceremony holds no appeal for her, her consent arising simply because this is his desire. She also takes pride in being a working woman in the face of custom: I might be a free citizen, a widow and ten years her senior, but I worked. For many people that put me down at the level of bar staff and public entertainers. To girls like Simplicia, I was practically illegal (281). In Deadly Election she again stresses the fact that her occupation sets her apart: “I was an informer myself. Public opinion was even harder on me, because respectable woman ought to remain at home all day” (5). Discussing the status of Roman women, Moses Finley contends that: It would probably be safe to guess that women of the lower class were therefore more ‘emancipated’, more equal de facto if not in strict law, more widely accepted as persons in their own right than their richer, more bourgeois, or more aristocratic sisters. (153)23 While lower-class women labored under the threefold-handicap of gender, work, and class, compounded by the fact that work was associated with baseness and subservience, they also had “more personal freedom than their elite sisters”.24 Working thus places Flavia Albia amongst the more emancipated— perhaps all the more so because she did not need to work. As she notes in the Ides of April, her profession also allows her to be independent: “I was already an informer by then [i.e., when she got married], earning my own living as a gesture of independence, even though Grandfather’s legacy had left my family comfortably off” (35).

22  Evans Grubbs (2002) 220. 23  M.I. Finley, “The Silent Women of Rome”, in Laura K. McClure (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) 147–160. 24  Ann R. Raia, “Being Female in Ancient Rome: Gender and Class Matters”. Paper delivered at a Colloquium on Integrating Roman Women into the Latin Curriculum Using the Worlds of Roman Women & its Companion Website, University of Maryland, 14 April, 2012: http://www2.cnr.edu/Home/araia/Ann_paperweb.pdf.

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After her husband’s accidental death, she resists her family’s suggestion that she return home, preferring to remain independent. Not being able to escape all Rome’s laws, she thus has to negotiate her independence with her parents, agreeing to participate in the ‘Ides of April’—by happenstance her birthday— in exchange for the freedom to spend the rest of her time as she wishes: “In an unstated way, they had made it conditional on their allowing me to be independent the rest of the time” (51). In the same vein, she tells Andronicus that “the one condition my parents laid on me when I started this work is that I must never, ever act as bait” (87). While acknowledging her submission to their authority, she immediately adds, “Of course I have done it. I just don’t tell them in advance” (87). Although officially honouring her parents and recognizing her father’s potestas, she is thus mostly free to do as she wishes. Her emancipation includes her sex life. Not only does she decide who and when she will meet but she is also willing to talk openly about her intimate needs—telling the readers after contemplating an affair with Andronicus that: “A woman has needs. Mine had not been met for a long time. Too long” (48)— and subsequently revealing: “There had been men before. I was no Vestal” (99). Her love life is not blooming, however, perhaps partly due to the fact that she is very cautious about who she allows into the sanctuary of her home: “After eight years, it was unsentimentally my place, where I could do as I chose; even so, only a really good love affair would make me break the chaste regime I had imposed on these rooms after Lentullus died” (99). Her sexual liberty is clear when she tries to seduce the aedile. Refusing the offer in order to remain friends and able to work with her in the future, he only becomes her lover at the end of the third book. While insisting on the freedom to live as she chooses, she nonetheless seeks her family’s approval of her choices, her father checking every potential lover she brings home: “Once our loving father scented any male interest in one of his daughters, he soon prepared an informer’s dossier on her suspect friend” (100). Thus although she is an independent working woman—a rarity in Roman patriarchal society and quite remarkable amongst her female social peers—she remains obedient to her father and family as expected by Roman convention. 3

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Flavia Albia’s mysterious origin also contributes to her Otherness. When we first meet her—in The Jupiter Myth (2003), the fourteenth book of the first series—she is a homeless fourteen-year-old in Londinium whom Helena, visiting

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her aunt and uncle with Falco and their daughters, spots and insists on giving a home. Despite her blue eyes, she has a Roman name: “She has a Roman name. neat trick. One of us—orphaned”. She was little more than a skeleton, her features unformed. She had blue eyes. That could be British.… Rome was damn well not responsible for her. (55) Helena, however, has no concerns about her ancestry. Flavia Albia gives her own version of her origins in The Ides of April: Nobody really knows when I was born, nor who my parents were. No one will ever know.… I was discovered as a crying baby in the streets of Londinium … People fostered me. My childhood was spent among shopkeepers.… I began to sense they had ideas of selling me into one kind of slavery or another, so I ran away.… Didius Falco and Helena Justina … certainly did not object to a challenge; by then I was undomesticated, vermin-ridden and although we never talked about it afterwards, I had been targeted by a brothel-owner and raped. I was aggressive and angry, too … (51–52) Despite adoption by a kind-hearted family and the grant of Roman citizenship, part of Flavia Albia always remains non-Roman. Although she wishes her past could have been different—“I wanted to be respectable. I wanted to come from a nice Roman family, and lead a decent life” (123)—she acknowledges that she cannot escape its impact and will never quite fit in: Maybe the fact that I had been nearly burned alive myself in the firestorm that destroyed Londinium made me so angry about the torches and terror that the devotees of Ceres perpetrated on the Aventine foxes. The foxes were like me. Private, ruthless and self-sufficient. Intelligent and untameable, yet capable of strong loyalty. Loners who could socialise, joyously and playfully, but afterwards slip back into being reclusive. We all lived within the city community, yet surreptitiously. We were never truly part of it. (54) She feels herself to be the hunted rather than one of the hunters, living on the edge of society like a fox in a den, sniffing out information, working swiftly and quietly. It is thus no wonder that she rebels against the Cerialia, taking the side of the foxes whose tails were set alight—allegedly punished for setting

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fire to Ceres’ grain. In doing so, she acts like the wild girl Flavia Albia rather than a proper Roman widowed matron. Readers may also recall that a similar event—her attempt to save hounds tied to a pillar in a burning bakery—was responsible for her initial meeting with Helena Justina in The Jupiter Myth. Her love of animals thus connects her past and present, adding to her distinctiveness. Despite being a Roman citizen, Flavia thus does not always act like one. 4 ‘Transgenderism’ In her well-known dictum, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, Simone de Beauvoir distinguishes sex from gender, suggesting that the latter is a gradually-acquired aspect of identity. This distinction has been crucial element in the longstanding feminist effort to debunk the claim that anatomy is destiny. Judith Butler develops this view in arguing that Beauvoir believes that, unlike sex, gender can be chosen: “To choose a gender is to interpret received gender norms in a way that organizes them anew. Rather than a radical act of creation, gender is a tacit project to renew one’s cultural history in one’s own terms”.25 Butler thus understands Beauvoir as a ‘voluntarist’—i.e., as a supporter of the premise that gender differences originate from an individual’s choices and decisions: “Indeed, for Beauvoir, sex is immutably factic, but gender acquired, and whereas sex cannot be changed—or so she thought— gender is variable cultural construction of sex, the myriad and open possibilities of cultural meaning occasioned by a sexed body”.26 Several of Butler’s critics have raised the question of whether Butler herself is a ‘voluntarist’. Ann Kaplan and Kath Weston, for example, maintain that she posits that a person chooses his/her gender in Gender Trouble. Others—such as Sara Heinämaa— allege that she argues against voluntarism.27 In Gender Trouble and later texts, however, Butler speaks of gender as an act or performance (later referring to ‘performativity’). This undermines the sex/gender dichotomy by making gender prior to sex, thereby enabling the “cultural practices of drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities” to be discussed.28 ‘Transgenderism’ being a ‘performance’—a behaviour—rather than a sexual 25  Judith Butler, “Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century”, Yale French Studies 72 (1986) 40. 26  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London/New York: Routledge, 2007) 152. 27  Ann E. Kaplan, “Review of Gender Trouble”, Signs, 17.4 (1992) 343–348; Kath Weston, “Do Clothes Make the Woman? Gender, Performance, Theory, and Lesbian Eroticism”, Genders, 17 (1993) 1–21; Sara Heinämaa, “What is a Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of Sexual Difference”, Hypatia, 12.1 (1997) 20–39. 28  Butler (2007) 187.

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term in Davis’s books, we shall remain here with Butler’s early interpretation of Beauvoir.29 Hence, while Flavia Albia chose to become a Roman citizen— “I agreed to be formally adopted” (52)—she retained the right not to accept Roman gender conventions. She in fact selects what she likes from the Roman social code—when to be a Roman matron and when cunning and uncivilized. When Falco and Helena first encounter her, she is a scavenger surviving on scraps from a bar. She herself portrays herself as “undomesticated, verminridden, aggressive and angry”—a far cry from her future as a Roman matron. None of her Romanization—legal adoption, granting of Roman citizenship, and marriage to a Roman—can take the foreignness out of her: “By the way— you, dear girl, may look like a neat little Roman matron who has a distaff in one hand and household accounts in the other, but you have a muddy provincial background and may be a druid!” (88). Her British origins remain a constant issue, one of her aunts in Enemies at Home calling her a Druid (185). While her status as a Roman matron may have become second nature to Flavia Albia, she knows that it is always an act: “Mother had taught me how to pose as a meek matron. It was ridiculous and hypocritical, but the act now came as second nature and I could manage it without laughing” (6). Small wonder that the only role in which she feels comfortable is that of a professional informer, a job that lets her work undercover digging out information, disclosing secrets, and hanging out dirty laundry. She is both a respectable Roman citizen and widowed matron and a wild, rough foreigner (she claims that she once killed an intruder). She thus epitomizes Butler’s interpretation of de Beauvoir’s notion of ‘becoming a woman’: To become a gender means both to submit to a cultural situation and to create one, and this view of gender as a dialectic of recovery and invention grants the possibility of autonomy within corporeal life that has few if any parallels in gender theory.30 By not submitting to her cultural situation but creating her own whenever it suits her, Flavia Albia fashions her own gender. This device of re-creating herself anew also helps her as an informer: not being expected to be have such a manly job, she uses her female charms to gain access to information she would 29  For the development of Butler’s theory, see Amalia Ziv, “Judith Butler—‘Gender Trouble’ ”, in Niza Yanay, Tamar El-Or, Orly Lubin, and Hannah Naveh (eds.), Venues of Feminist Thinking: An Introduction to Gender Studies (Raanana: Open University Press, 2007) 619– 661 (Hebrew). 30  Butler (1986) 24.

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never have obtained as a man. In addressing the prostitutes in The Graveyard of the Hesperides, she adduces her British past to get them to cooperate with her, for example. When speaking to Gran in the kitchen of the Brown Toad, in contrast, she presents herself as a devoted granddaughter. With Lepida she portrays herself as Roman born rather than a foreigner. She thus chooses her gender according to the situation and the profit this role will gain her. Flavia Albia is not the only person who chooses her performances (and her gender according to the late Butler) in the series, however. In The Ides of April, the plebeian aedile Tiberius Manlius Faustus presents himself to Flavia Albia as a runner. Hereby, he lowers his ‘sacrosanct’ status as an aedile (350), working against and with Flavia Albia virtually as her equal. At the end of Enemies at Home, another fascinating change occurs. The poisoned Flavia Albia is taken care of by the aedile (380–382), whom she describes as a substitute mother, her own mother taking his place when she regains her health. This represents another type of gender exchange, male ‘performance’ of the maternal role being highly unusual. Faustus explains his ‘functioning’ to Flavia Alba by saying that, “he had a younger sister; his mother had taught him to help bath the baby. This was so he would not be afraid of children if he ever had any—and he would not be shy with girls”. (383) Just as his mother gave him an unconventional upbringing, so Flavia Albia’s parents gave her a full education, rarely gained by woman in the Empire (Deadly Election, 8). In both cases (Flavia Albia “unusual job for a woman” and Faustus’ “motherly behaviour”), the roots of their behaviour lie in their childhood and home. Nevertheless, one must add that as the series proceeds the change in gender roles modifies and in the last book so far, The Graveyard of the Hesperides, the aedile want their relationship to become ‘honourable’ by getting married. Although, as I mentioned before, Flavia Albia doesn’t see the importance of this act, she agrees to it. Nevertheless, she prefers continue working to wedding planning, mocking some of the ceremony parts (“The saffron veil is intended to be a symbol of submission to your husband. We all guffawed” [371]). She even goes in the middle of the wedding’s celebrations to meet one of her witnesses. It almost seems that while agreeing to the wedding ceremony Flavia Albia thinks of it more as a performance she participates in, this time in the role of a bride. 5 Conclusion Flavia Albia submits to her ‘cultural situation’ by acting as a Roman matron and respecting the conventions of Roman society. She also ‘creates’ her own selfhood by retaining her foreign roots and undermining social conventions

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by not remarrying (at least until the last book), preserving her sexual freedom, and working in a male-dominated profession. Combining her past and present, she thereby ‘invents’ an autonomous gender for herself. Faustus exploits the Roman class stratification in order to appear Flavia Albia’s equal in The Ides of April, presenting himself as a runner rather than an aedile. While he does not acquire real feminine traits, his maternal side is revealed when required. We may thus assume that he also chose his gender while accepting Flavia Albia’s. Why does Davis choose to play with gender issues and Otherness in this series? Although a definitive answer to this question is difficult to adduce, she may have decided to make her hero simultaneously a Roman and a foreigner due to the fact that female informers did not exist in the ancient Roman Empire. Her choice of the historical mystery genre restricts her to the conventions of the period. Adding a female informer without a ‘twist’ may well have made it hard for readers to believe that ‘a good honorable woman’ from an equestrian family might have worked—let alone as an informer, a very masculine occupation. Flavia Albia’s background as an adopted Briton, however, means that she is in some senses a ‘barbarian’ (“These two well-dressed women from ancient civilised provinces, Spain and Greece, regarded me as a wild barbarian since I came from Britain” [Enemies at Home, 185]). Similarly, the fact she claims that she is only acting as though she were an ‘honourable Roman widow’ makes her activities more ‘authentic’. Flavia Albia is not Davis’ only heroine—and certainly not her first. Her two historical novels set in Roman, The Course of Honour (her first written book, published only on 1997) and Master and God (2012), make it clear that she did not need Flavia Albia to be a female sequel to the Falco series. The protagonists in both are Roman women—Caenis, a slave girl who becomes Vespasian’s lover and later mistress, and Flavia Lucilla, a freedwoman and imperial hairdresser. Although both are of a lower rank than Flavia Albia, thus being forced to work, they seek to become as independent as possible. They nonetheless presage Flavia Albia as strong women who aspire for a “place of their own” within the Roman patriarchal society. Only with Flavia Albia, however, does Davis achieve a full form of transgendering—from her manly job unsuited to a woman through to cultural role as a foreigner and Roman. Davis’ fascination with Roman women is rather puzzling in light of her assertion that she would not have liked to visit ancient Rome on the grounds that “It wouldn’t be comfortable for a woman and I would find that very restrictive”.31 This may, however, explain the fact that all of her Roman women (including Helena 31  Jeffrey Marks, “When in Rome … Lindsey Davis and her Mysteries of the Ancient World”, The Armchair Detective, 30.2 (1997) 190–194.

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Justina in the Falco series) rebel in some way or form against Roman patriarchalism and traditional class society. Flavia Albia may also serve as a way of making the protagonist more accessible to the modern reader, her independence, free sexuality, and working in a male-dominant profession being ‘near and dear’ qualities to contemporary women. As Ray Browne observes in relation to historical-crime fiction: The author has the necessity of imposing a familiar pattern on an unfamiliar world and making the characters both familiar and interesting. In other words, the author must animate the characters and events of the past and make them live.32 By describing Flavia Albia as playing at being a Roman, celebrating her ‘barbarian’ aspects, both cultured and wild, a committed daughter and an independent working woman in a male profession, she comes across as an authentic character with whom modern readers can nonetheless identify. By portraying Flavia Albia as an early ‘feminist’ of sorts who chooses her own way of life, transgendering herself into whatever cultural mask she decides suits the situation, Davis thus gives her protagonist a more contemporary place in ancient historical Rome. In making her both Roman and foreigner, she enables her to look at Roman society from inside and outside. Her “unsuitable job for a woman” as an informer also allows her to tackle Rome from different angles, giving us a fresh look from a feminine point of view of the ‘mean streets of Rome’. Bibliography Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex (trans. H.M. Parshley) (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956). Browne, Ray B. and Lawrence A. Kreiser, “Introduction”, in idem (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 2000) 1–10. Browne, Ray B., “David Wishart: Democratizing Roman Culture through Crime Fiction”, in Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction II (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) 1–15.

32  Browne (2007) 1.

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Butler, Judith, “Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century”, Yale French Studies 72 (1986) 35–49. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble (London/New York: Routledge, 2007). Cawelti, John, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Davis, Lindsey, The Course of Honour (London: Arrow, 1997). Davis, Lindsey, The Jupiter Myth (London: Arrow, 2003). Davis, Lindsey, Master and God (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2012). Davis, Lindsey, The Ides of April (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013). Davis, Lindsey, Enemies at Home (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014). Davis, Lindsey, Deadly Election (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015). Davis, Lindsey, The Graveyard of the Hesperides (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2016). Evans Grubbs, Judith, Women and the Law in the Roman Empire (London/New York: Routledge, 2002). Finley, M.I., “The Silent Women of Rome”, in Laura K. McClure (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 147–160. Friedrich, Silke, Queens of Crime—American and British Female Detective Novels over the Course of Time (Hamburg: Anchor, 2012). Hallett, Judith, “Women as Same and Other in Classical Roman Elite”, Helios 16.1 (1989) 59–78. Heinämaa, Sara, “What is a Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of Sexual Difference”, Hypatia, 12.1 (1997) 20–39. Hunt, Peter, “Lindsey Davis: Falco, Cynical Detective in a Corrupt Roman Empire”, in Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 2000) 32–44. Kaplan, Ann E., “Review of Gender Trouble”, Signs, 17.4 (1992), 343–348. Kelly, Benjamin, “Crime, Law, and Order”, in Matt Gibbs, Milorad Nikolic, and Pauline Ripat (eds.), Themes in Roman Society and Culture (Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2014) 241–258. Knight, Stephen, “‘A Hard Cheerfulness’”: An Introduction to Raymond Chandler”, in Brian Docherty (ed.), American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) 71–87. Marks, Jeffrey, “When in Rome … Lindsey Davis and her Mysteries of the Ancient World”, The Armchair Detective 30.2 (1997) 190–194. Ogden, Bethany, “Hard-boiled Ideology”, Critical Quarterly 34.1 (1992) 71–87. Paradis, Kenneth, “Warshawski’s Situation: Beauvoirean Feminism and the HardBoiled Detective”, South Central Review 18.3–4 (2001) 86–101. Raia, Ann R., “Being Female in Ancient Rome: Gender and Class Matters”. Paper delivered at a Colloquium on Integrating Roman Women into the Latin Curriculum Using

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the Worlds of Roman Women & its Companion Website, University of Maryland, 14 April, 2012: http://www2.cnr.edu/Home/araia/Ann_paperweb.pdf. Scaggs, John, Crime Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2005). Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004). Tomc, Sandra, “Questing Women: The Feminist Mystery after Feminism”, in Glenwood Irons (ed.), Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995) 46–63. Weston Kath, “Do Clothes Make the Woman? Gender, Performance, Theory, and Lesbian Eroticism”, Genders 17 (1993) 1–21. Winks, Robin W., “Preface”, in Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 2000) ix–x. Ziv, Amalia, “Judith Butler—‘Gender Trouble’ ”, in Niza Yanay, Tamar El-Or, Orly Lubin, and Hannah Naveh (eds.), Venues of Feminist Thinking: An Introduction to Gender Studies (Raanana: Open University Press, 2007) 619–661 (Hebrew).

CHAPTER 3

“An Open Account from the Past Always Needs to be Settled”: Chimaira (2001) / The Ancient Curse (2010) and Receiving the Past Claudia Fratini The fictional works of Valerio Massimo Manfredi are rarely subject of academic papers with exception perhaps for two articles written on his Alexander Trilogy (1998).1 Writing from a historical and archaeological perspective, Manfredi’s novels are thoroughly researched and although at times certain poetic liberties are taken and deviations made in terms of characters and events, his fictional works seek to present a ‘real’2 or authentic historical narrative. In the “Author’s Note” following Alexander: The Ends of the Earth, Book 3 of the Alexander Trilogy, Manfredi takes great care to explain the process he followed when writing the novels, the historical inaccuracies and the ‘deviations’ made for dramatic effect: My aim in writing this ‘romance’ of Alexander in a contemporary style has been to recount, in the most realistic and involving way possible, one of the greatest adventures of all time. I have always sought, however, to remain as faithful as possible to the sources, both literary and material.3 In many respects, Manfredi’s approach to historical fiction aligns itself with Alessandro Manzoni’s idea that, the historical novelist is not only required to 1   Aleya A. Said (2009) ‘Two tales of one Alexander’, Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, Vol. 2 Iss: 2, pp. 86–95; Manel Garcia Sánchez (2005) ‘La representacion del Gran Rey aqueménida en la novella história contemporánea’, Historiae, 2005, pp. 91–113. 2  ‘real’in the sense that history can never be recounted ‘as-it-really-was’ because of the gaps that exist in the present. The over-reliance on the positivistic view adopted by many an Anglophone classicist is a point that Charles Martindale both discusses and criticises in his work Redeeming the Text (1993) and takes up again in Classics and the Uses of Reception (2006). The past will always be recounted from a certain perspective and when dealing with the ancient past, these gaps in perspective can only be filled by the data at the researcher’s disposal and the deductions that are made from that data. 3  Valerio Massimo Manfredi, Alexander: The End of the Earth (London: Pan Macmillan, 2002) 573. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004346383_005

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write “the bare bones of history, but something richer, more complete. In a way you want him to put the flesh back on the skeleton that is history”.4 Browne and Kreiser maintain that although it may be the historian’s task to separate truth from fiction, it is as important for him / her to discover the truth in fiction.5 Although the same research method used in the writing of his historical novels may apply to Manfredi’s popular narratives, they do tend to present a challenge both for the literary scholar and for the general reader, often being described as ‘a guilty pleasure’ by writers and readers of historical fiction alike.6 However, looking beyond what may be ‘lost-in-translation’, the difficulty faced by readers when approaching these works of popular fiction is Manfredi’s reinvention of the historical artefact. In novels such as Chimaira (2001) / The Anceint Curse (2010), L’oracolo (1990) / The Oracle (2005), La torre della solitudine (1996) / The Tower (2006) and Il faraone delle sabbie (1998) / Pharaoh (2008), historical artefacts and their (his)stories are transported through time and allowed to speak new stories that resonate from the past in the present.7 In these works of popular fiction, Manfredi taps into the past through the use of original archaeological artefacts, historical events and texts that relate back to an authentic historical incident but which are, in fact, shaped and re-interpreted to create a new (hi)story that defies historicism.8 If one acknowledges Martindale’s view that the past and present are ‘always implicated in each other’ (Martindale, 2006: 5%), in as much as the narrative of present is shaped by the resonating narrative created by the ‘text’ of the past, then in terms of Manfredi’s popular novels, rather than careless inaccuracy, this bending and realignment of the historic allows for the interrogation of the present in its

4  Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel (trans. Sandra Bermann Lincoln) (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1984) 67–8. 5  Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction. (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) 1–15. 6  A possible reason for this statement could be that the majority of Manfredi’s Anglophone readers would be accessing his works in translation and not in the original Italian. Most of Manfredi’s works are translated by his wife, Christine Feddersen-Manfredi with the exception of the Alexander Trilogy translated by Iain Halliday. 7  To the historical purist, this re-invention of the historical artefact could be considered a form of looting, as the text or object is displaced from its original historical and locational space, thus situating it in a time-space limbo. It is however this time-space limbo that allows of the reception of the classic to speak through its ancient past to the present. Reception itself thus becomes akin to looting. 8  The term historicism for the purposes of this discussion is taken to mean the reconstruction and retelling of the past ‘as-it-really-was’.

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interactions with the past through a Derridaean notion of ‘text’9—a notion that is explored by Haynes when he states that: [t]he question of what a text means now … is another matter. Whether a work has the capacity to help us to form an understanding of the world that orientates us towards moral action (even when it does so negatively by showing us how not to behave) is not a question which can be answered by historical scholarship.10 In line with the above, Manfredi’s popular novels make use of ‘texts’ from the past to create stories that resonate with the past but which are clearly set in the present, allowing the reader to engage with questions of ‘moral action’. In Chimaira (2001) / The Ancient Curse (2010) the ancient past is explored through the creation of spaces of darkness and terror that resurrect the dark arts and practices of a civilization that still today remains a partially decoded enigma to scholars of the Etruscan people;11 their religious practices are equally buried with the bucchero pottery and funerary art that lies entombed in sacred burial mounds staring at the modern viewer as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa’s smile. Drawing on archaeological artefacts that are physically present in museums in Italy as well as writing fictional archaeological sites that allude to actual excavations and finds,12 the ‘original’ text is (re)produced and given added meaning in the context of present. This observation, when viewed in conjunction with Benjamin’s treaties, The Work of Art in the Age of Technological 9  In his work, Of Grammatology (1976), Derrida explores the notion that all things exist because they are text / written. There is therefore nothing that is ‘outside-text’ (158). There is therefore no such thing as a ‘representation’ or ‘copy’ for even the ‘copy’ holds traces of the original and is therefore an original in its own right. This concept is again taken up in Positions (1981) and will be further explored in this discussion. 10  Kenneth Haynes, “Text, Theory and Reception”, in Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (eds.), Classics and the Uses of Reception. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) 45. 11  Although much detective work has been done by such scholars as Stefan Weinstock (1946), Massimo Pallottino(1955), Ugo Di Martino (2000), Larissa Bonfante, Giovanni Semerano (2003), to name but a few, the complexity of the Etruscan civilization remains obscure, shrouded in mystery; gleaned at through the mirror of what remains in the writings of later Roman thinkers and historians the likes of Tarquintius Priscus, Caecina, Pliny the Elder, Vicellius, Fonteius and Varro. 12  The statue of the young Etruscan boy entitled L’ombra della sera / The shade of twilight housed in the Volterra Museum; Etruscan tomb frescos and cenotaphs that resemble those in the Tomb of the Augurs (Tarquinia), Tomb of the Lioness (Tarquinia); Tomb of the Dancers (Tarquinia); Tomb of the Shields (Tarquinia); Tomb of the Leopards (Cerveteri).

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Reproducibility (1936–1939),13 allows for Manfredi’s work to be interrogated alongside genres of ‘pure’ historical fiction. Set in Volterra, an Italian town in Tuscany steeped in Etruscan tradition and history, Chimaira (2001) / The Ancient Curse (2010) follows the discoveries of a young archaeologist, Fabrizio Castellani. Recently transferred to Volterra from Florence, Fabrizio is in the process of researching an ancient Etruscan statue of a young boy. His interest in the piece is sparked when, while attending a workshop in Florence on the restoration of bronzes he chances upon a set of x-rays of the statue that reveal a strange anomaly in the casting. His investigation of this anomaly while in Volterra is marked by a series of ominously eerie events. On the first night he spends at the museum he is startled by a strange phone-call that warns him to: “Leave the boy alone!” (Manfredi, 2010: 10).14 The silence of the night is then pierced by the strange howling of a wild animal which is followed by the brutal murder of the infamous tombraider, Armando Ronchetti at the site of one of his recently pillaged Etruscan tombs.15 Ronchetti’s murder will be followed by a sequence of further brutal and mysterious killings of key characters. It is through the investigation of these murders, the deciphering of the inscriptions on a gold slab, jealously coveted by the museum director and the interventions of a seemingly orphaned child in the present that a 2.500-year-old wrong is exposed and the implications of the ‘past in the present’ as well as how the past orientates one to ‘moral judgement’ revealed. The statue being investigated by Fabrizio is called, L’ombra della sera / The Shade of Twilight and refers to an actual statue that is housed in the Volterra museum.16 By utilising the name of an actual statue in Chimaira (2001) / The 13   Focussing primarily on photography and film and the reproduction of objects through media, he states that reproduction, far from detracting from the original, allows aspects of the object to be seen that are not necessarily visible to the naked eye of the viewer in the original. Furthermore, this reproduction allows the object to be viewed by multiple viewers in situations that the original may never be able to attain. The immovable object is therefore rendered dynamic and movable whilst still retaining its authenticity (aura) which is in turn is augmented by each new interpretation. 14  “Lascia in pace il fanciullo!” (Manfredi (2001) 16). 15  The references to the pillaged tomb and looted artefacts within the narrative serve as pointers, guiding the reader to interrogate the issues that surround looted objects and their liminal status within the context of the archive. This question will be further discussed later in the Chapter. 16  The actual statue was found by Antonio Francesco Gori in 1737 in the residence of the Bounarotti family. Circa ten years after its discovery the statue enters the possession of Mario Guarnacci who then donates it to the Volterra museum. It is believed that the Italian poet, D’Annunzio bestowed upon this statue its enigmatic title of l’ombra della

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Ancient Curse (2010), Manfredi creates a narrative space that rests both in the dimension of fact, as well as of fiction. Although the allusion to the original statue rests in fact, it is described through its modern receptions, demonstrating that the past, as qualified by the ancient texts and objects, cannot be separated from the present:17 The choice of subject was incredibly original, the crafting extraordinary. The aura that emanated from the boy was intense and emotional capturing all the poetry of Vincenzo Gemito’s street urchins, the expressive punch of Picasso, the exasperating fragility of Giacometti’s most inspired bronzes.18,19 However, the statue and its x-rays and the spate of brutal murders being committed in the town further open the interrogations of the narrative. Through the (re)creation of objects / texts, the prophecy that ‘an open account from the past always has to be settled’20 (Manfredi 2010: 135) is explored and questions surrounding the archive and its inherent nature of both revealing and concealing21 illustrated through the creation of spaces that both house and hide the discovered objects which, in themselves become archives of the past. Serving as inspiration for the English title of the novel, the ‘ancient curse’ referred to in the narrative is set in motion when the approximately 2.500-yearold tomb of Turm Kaiknas, a well-respected and loved Etruscan noble, known for his valour and deeds of heroism is disturbed by the tomb-raider, Armando sera as it reminded him of the long shadows that fall at dusk. This observation is taken up again in 1988 by the art historian and honorary inspector of the Soprintendenza alle Antichità of the Lombardy region, Piero Airaghi who posits that the statue is in itself a representation of the shadow of a young boy. 17  Martindale in discussing Pater’s observations that in order for the Classics to be relevant they need to be meaningful both in the classical and modern context states that, ‘… modernity can be modern only insofar as it postdates or supersedes the past, the embedded traces of which are, indeed, the very proof of modernity’ (Charles Martindale, “Introduction”, in Charles Martindale, and Richard F. Thomas, (eds.), Classics and the Uses of Reception (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) 8. 18  Valerio Massimo Manfredi, The Ancient Curse (London: Pan Macmillan, 2010) 9. 19  … l’originalità del soggetto, la straordinaria qualità dell’esecuzione, l’intensa e la profonda suggestione che emanava lo facevano pensare a certe poetiche forme di scugnizzi realizzati da Vincenzo Gemito, ma anche alla potenza espressiva di Picasso e, allo stesso tempo, al senso di esasperata fragilità dei bronzi più ispirati di Giacometti. (Manfredi, Chimaira (Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 2001) 15. 20  ‘… i conti rimasti aperti nel passato prima o poi vanno saldati.’ (Manfredi (2001) 141). 21  Derrida, Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (Trans. Eric Prenowitz) Diacritics 25.2 (1995) 9–63.

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Ronchetti, also the first victim in the novel. When Fabrizio is asked by the museum director, Balestra, who is secretly working on the translation of an Etruscan gold slab, to oversee and conduct the excavation, what the young archaeologist finds is nothing that he had expected. He had expected to find an urn with the ashes of the deceased, along with all the usual objects that accompanied the funeral rites. What met his eyes instead was a scene of horror … He saw a tangle of human and animal bones, all jumbled up and practically fused together by a fury and ferocity beyond any human limit … a human body that was barely recognisable. Shattered bones, mangled limbs, a crushed scull whose top dental arch yawned wide in a scream of pain that could no longer be heard but was still present, desperate, immortal.22 Similar to the ‘scream of pain … no longer audible but still present’ in the remains found by Fabrizio, the past as manifest by ancient texts / objects when reproduced, permeates and qualifies the present through the aura of its reproduction and reception. No longer hidden from the plebes by the custodial power of the archivist, the text / object becomes an archive of the past to be explored and interpreted by the writer and reader. It is though this ‘looting’ of the archive that the once mystical object, hidden from the plebes becomes the property of the plebes allowing it to gain new meaning.23 The core of the narrative revolves around the statue that Fabrizio is investigating, l’ombra della sera / The shade of twilight. In the novel, the statue performs a dual role, it is both artefact and archive. The statue is an artefact in as much as it is a historical / real object that is on display in the Volterra museum; it is also an archive as it shelters a hidden secret—a secret which is revealed through the fictional narrative of the past. It is through this object from the 22  Manfredi (2010) 37. Si aspettava un’urna con le ceneri di un defunto e vicino gli usuali oggetti di corredo del rito funerario e invece gli si offrì alla vista una scena di orrore … Vide un groviglio di ossa umane e ferine mescolate insieme e quasi fuse da una furia e da una ferocia senza limiti … un corpo umano quasi non più riconoscibile: ossa in frantumi, arti maciullati, un cranio sfracellato in cui si riconosceva a malapena l’arcata dentale superiore spalancata sulla mandibola in un grido di dolore non più udibile, ma presente, disperato, immortale. (Manfredi (2001) 43). 23  L. W-T. Leong, “Cultural Resistance: The Cultural Terrorism of British Male Working-Class Youth”, Current Perspectives in Social Theory 12 (1992) 29–58, as quoted by Toby Miller “Introduction”, in idem (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2015) 6, asserts that, “the working assumption [in cultural studies] has often been that subordinate groups adopt and adapt signs and objects from dominant culture, recognizing them to manufacture new meanings”.

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past, that Manfredi fuses the past and present together to create a narrative of popular fiction that uses the past to reveal a discourse that interrogates the historical validity of the looted object. At first glance Chimaira (2001) / The Ancient Curse (2010) seems to fit the definition of a standard detective novel, however as the narrative progresses, the genre transforms, reshapes itself, similar to the chimaera at its core into a thriller, only to conclude like every detective novel in the resolution of the mystery. A standard definition of the classical detective novel is offered by Hühn (1987: 451) in an article that explores the role of reading in the genre of detective fiction. From a narratological point of view, the classical detective novel works on two levels: the reconstruction of the ‘hidden story (that is, the crime) and the process of reconstruction (that is, the detection)’. In terms of the surface narrative structure of the novel in question, this is true: the ‘hidden story’ or crime can be construed as the series of brutal murders being perpetrated in the town of Volterra by an unknown assailant; the ‘process of reconstruction’ or the ‘detection’ the solving of these murders by the ‘detective’ who sifts through the evidence of the crimes and draws his logical conclusions. However, although the surface mystery contained in the plot, the sudden spate of violent murders following the desecration of an ancient Etruscan tomb, may be resolved, sanitised and rationalised to fit convention, the hidden truth of what or who actually perpetrates the murders and the reasons behind them remains hidden from the sight of the observer. It is this hidden truth that opens up the discussion of the intersection between past and present and how the reception of the past implicates the present. The novel in fact has two crimes (the unjust death of Turm Kaiknas, Etruscan noble unjustly accused of murdering his wife and child (past) and the murders of a series of townspeople in Volterra (present)): it also has two detectives (Fabrizio Castellani, archaeologist and Lieutenant Marcello Reggiani, chief investigator of the Volterra Police, each inhabiting different spaces in time—past and present—but each inextricably linked to each other. It is only through the unravelling of the crime of the past, that the crime(s) of the present can be solved.24 The tomb excavated by Fabrizio is bare except for a roughly carved stone sarcophagus, and a cenotaph in solid alabaster of a young woman. The contents of the sarcophagus reveal a mixture of faunal and human remains and the lid and inside of the funerary vessel are gauged by scratch marks. Although

24  The two detectives also further explore the theme of looting within the narrative. Fabrizio, the archaeologist acts as the legitimized looter, conducting sanctioned digs to further scientific and historical investigation; Reggiani acts as the ‘long-arm-of-the-law’, tracking down unsanctioned digs by looters.

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not initially evident to Fabrizio, this is the tomb of a Phersu.25 However, from the description given of the tomb, it is clear that something is amiss as the tomb indicates that its occupants were of noble descent. The two door panels finally separated from each other with a slight grinding of fine sand, letting the first beams of light into the tomb after 2.500 years. The scowl of Charun—the demon who accompanied the dead to the other world—greeted him. A fresco of good quality, the work of an artist from Tarquinia … It was on his left that he first distinguished the body of a reclining woman sculpted softly into a block of alabaster … She was resting on her right elbow so that she faced the other sarcophagus on the opposite wall. The female figure was wearing her jewellery: a necklace, a bracelet, rings and earnings, and her hair was gathered at the nape of her neck with a ribbon.26 Why then would a phersu be buried in accordance with the funerary rites of an honourable man? As the plot unfolds, and Fabrizio begins to piece together the story of the past, is it revealed that the tomb is that of Turm Kaiknas, a loved and respected noble of Velathri whose wife, Anait and child, Velies were murdered in a jealous rage by the ruthless Lars Thyrrens who lusted after Anait, who never returned his advances. On a fateful night, while dining at the home of Turm Kaiknas, Lars Thyrrens, through a cunning ruse, lures Anait away from her husband, violates her and kills her innocent son who accidentally walks in on the assault and tries to save his mother. Turm Kaiknas is falsely accused of the murders and Lars Thyrrens, having secured his alibi, sentences Turm 25  The ritual described in Manfredi’s novel is reminiscent of the right wall of the ‘Tomb of the Augurs’ in Tarquinia. The panel depicts the practice of phersu or persu with two men, one of which has a sack / hood over his head, the other holding a rope / lead which is tied around the neck of an animal, presumed to be a dog. The hooded figure, probably a criminal is being punished for his action. When the figure holding the rope pulls on it, a spike is released in the collar of the animal, enraging it and causing it to attack the hooded man. 26  Manfredi (2010) 35. I due battenti si separarono finalmente uno dall’altro con un lieve scricchiolio di sabbia macinata nei cardini, lasciando filtrare all’interno il primo raggio di sole dopo duemilacinquecento anni. Il ghigno di Charun, il traghettatore dei morti, fu quello che apparve subito a Fabrizio, un affresco di buona qualità, opera probabilmente di un artista tarquiniese … Era là, alla sua sinistra, che si distingueva il corpo sdraiato di una donna scolpito morbidamente in un blocco di alabastro … appoggiata sul gomito destro in modo che il suo sguardo si posava, quasi, sull’altro sarcofago che le stava davanti … La figura femminile era adorna dei gioielli: una collana, un bracciale, anelli e orecchini, e portava i capelli raccolti sulla nuca e cinti da un nastro. (Manfredi (2001) 41).

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Kaiknas to the dreaded trial by phersu in order to ‘prove’ his innocence. The only person who speaks out against the false accusations is Anait’s brother Aule Tarchna, an augur who after Lars Thyrrens burns Turm Kaiknas’s house with the bodies of his wife and child, unable to collect the ashes, casts an effigy of the boy with the dagger that killed him forged in the statue. After the brutal death of Turm Kaiknas through phersu, Aule Tarchna inscribes a gold slab with a curse and buries it in the tomb together with the statue and the remains of Turm Kaiknas. The gold slab, statue of the young boy and the tomb all become part of the unravelling of the mystery in the present when the tomb is pillaged over the years and the individual objects scattered and sold off on the antiquities market. Each displaced object becomes linked to a single violent event, which took place in the past and which is vindicated in the present by a curse on the people of Velathri cast by Aule Tarchna, an augur and brother-in-law to the fated Turm Kaiknas. The allusion to the ethereal, Etruscan statue represents the shadow cast by Velies, son of the defiled and murdered Anait, who witnesses his mother’s death at the hands of the ruthless Lars Thyrrens, casting the fabula of the narrative of the past, while the descriptive allusion to the works of Gemito, Picasso and Giacometti refocuses the reader’s attention to the narrative unfolding in the present. The corporality of the description therefore, alludes to the physical apparition of Velies (the past) and his role, post-mortem, in the unravelling of the mystery and vindication of his father’s murder at the hands of the town’s people of Velathri. The past and present thus become implicated in each other through Manfredi’s use of a variety of texts that create a ‘multidimensional space’ in which his narrative can unfurl. The detective novel relies on the character of the detective who through the progression of events finds clues and resolves the crime, and although the novel has a detective in the vestiges of Lieutenant Reggiani his skills prove ineffective in resolving the core of the mystery. His expertise rests in the modern world and within the context of the narrative inhabits the realm of logic and reason. The idea that the spate of murders is caused by the ‘resurrection’ of an ancient beast linked to the ancient and violent practice of phersu is implausible. To him, the murders can only be perpetrated by someone re-enacting this ancient ritual. In the novel the series of murders and the bodies of the victims show distinctive signs of having being mauled by a very large animal, something resembling a wolf or large predator. While discussing the event with Fabrizio, Reggiani points out that: “As a matter of principle, I can only consider hypotheses that are rational, caused by a natural sequence of events.”.27 27  Manfredi (2010) 63. “Non fosse altro che per una questione di principio io devo pensare a cause di carattere naturale, e in termini assolutamente razionali”, Manfredi (2001) 70.

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The murders are in fact solved by Fabrizio, the archaeologist who, although at the beginning of the novel is also driven by logic and reason,28 as the events develop and more clues are dug up and revealed, is able to reconcile logic and reason with the possibly ‘supernatural’ or mythic. It is this reconciliation of logic and the supernatural that brings to the fore what Kittelson refers to as the soul of popular culture.29 The revelation of the mystery and the events of the past are revealed to Fabrizio in a dream after he collapses from exhaustion having worked on the final translation of the gold tablet through the night. In his dream, Fabrizio is transported back to that fated night when the heinous crimes are committed and Turm Kaiknas is sentenced to his brutal and unjust death. He views the happenings from afar, as an observer. In this sequence, Fabrizio becomes both the Etruscan augur, scrying through time, and the modern reader of the classical past, distanced from historical reality and viewing it through the filter of a classic epic on a screen. The reversal of the time continuum—present to future (augur) and present to past (Fabrizio), can be interpreted as the author’s subtle dig at ‘historicism’, however it is also indicative of the nature of popular culture, which through the projection of the image is able to subconsciously reveal us to ourselves.30 One might in this chapter of the novel begin to question Manfredi’s logic in the development of his character, Fabrizio, having made him criticise ‘pseudoscientific New Age hype’ in the opening chapters of the novel, however on closer reflection, what Fabrizio fills in through his dream is in fact what Manzoni terms, ‘the fleshing out of the bare bones of history’. The mystery is in fact solved by scientific investigation—the final translation of the missing piece of the gold tablet, however leaving it at that would defeat the dynamic objectives of the reception and the premise that the past cannot be told ‘as it really 28  When trying to make sense of the sudden phone-call in the middle of the night telling him to “Leave the boy alone” (Manfredi, 2010: 10) Fabrizio rationalises as concludes that rational explanation could be that “one of the library clerks had heard about his research and spoken about him to some impressionable soul, one of those fanatics who live on pseudo-scientific New Age hype … Obsessed with the pyramids or—why not?—the Etruscans. After all, the Etruscans were second only to the Egyptians in their legendary fascination with the afterlife, and famous for being soothsayers and sorcerers”, Manfredi (2010) 11. 29  Mary Lynn Kittelson, “Editor’s Introduction”, in idem (ed.), The Soul of Popular Culture (Chicago: Open Court, 1998) 3. “From a Jungian perspective, the way that the cultural psyche or soul reveals itself is through its images and dreams, wherever they occur. The most widespread and most vivid societal images are found in the society’s popular culture; and thus to get a sense of the fullness and richness of this cultural soul, we need to explore its images”. 30  Ibid.

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was’, for even scientific interrogation and investigation has its flaws when dealing with history, it marginalises the human factor. Thus the novel, in order to make provision for this human factor, breaks from the convention of detective fiction and makes use of two detectives that occupy two spaces within the narrative—the tangible and the intangible, the past and the present. Like the images on a shattered amphora carefully pieced together by the restorer there are spaces, aspects of the image that are absent due to the displaced shards. In order to make the object whole, these spaces need to be filled, reconstructed. The process of restoration can however only fill the spaces according to the restorer’s ability and knowledge, inherent or acquired through research, of the object. The space, is thus filled by a new space, bestowing upon the object a new life in a new dimension. In alignment with Derrida’s observation where, “[n]othing … is anywhere simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces”,31 in Manfredi’s novel, these spaces are (re)constructed by resonances of the past transfigured to (re)claim meaning in a narrative of present. Related to the question of classical reception studies, the past is never simply present or absent, as it manifests in the present through differences and although the ancient texts or objects may be reproduced through narratives of present their aura, or ‘traces’ are present in differing interpretations through time.32 Through the finding of the hidden images of the statue, the ‘space’ of the ‘archive’ as defined by Derrida is also explored: the archive, by nature of its root name, arkhē, shelters both its contents as well as itself from memory.33 The xrays are hidden and no one has discovered their existence, or most likely, with the passing of time their existence has faded from memory. Fabrizio’s discovery of the images in the drawer and exploration of the physical statue reveals a further archive, the statue, L’ombra della sera / The Shade of Twilight, which in itself ‘reveals’ and ‘conceals’. The statue ‘reveals’ in as much as it is present in the museum, visible to the public; it ‘conceals’, not only the dagger but also its history as its exact origins are unknown. Although both the reproduced object in the narrative and the actual statue in the Volterra museum cannot be placed 31  Jacques Derrida, Positions. (trans. Alan Bass) (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981). 32  As stated by Julia Graisser, “The Reception of Classical Texts in the Renaissance”, in Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (eds.), The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002) 387. “[classical texts / objects] are pliable and sticky artefacts gripped, moulded, and stamped with new meanings by every generation of readers, and they come to us irreversibly altered by their experiences”. 33  The concept of the archive shelters itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhē. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it. (Derrida (1995) 9).

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at any specific archaeological excavation,34 their value is not diminished. Their value rests not in their exact provenance, but in that which is not there, the traces of the past that cannot be seen. Through this exploration the question of the subaltern is raised. Although a term used more prolifically in the context of post-colonial studies, where the human object is referred to in his/her original text, the premise that the subaltern may be able to act but not be noticed is present in Manfredi’s text through ancient objects. In an article which debates the issues of illegally traded objects from antiquity, Amanda Gustafsson, through the philosophical works of Spivak35 and Derrida,36 reviews the value of the looted object in a museum and posits that the looted object, although ‘deprived’ of its historical and contextual origin does possess a value: While illegally obtained objects with no provenance are seen by many archaeologists and museologists as objects with “limited scientific value” (Kankpeyeng & DeCorse, 2004: 105), I believe this is incorrect. Looted objects can sometimes give those interested even more information than a documented object can, although a different type of information and more about contemporary situations than past ones.37 The reception of ancient texts and objects in popular literature may be viewed in a similar light in as much as they do not seek to tell the past, they tell a new story, informed with what information we have from the past, but which speaks more to the contemporary present than telling the past ‘as-it-reallywas’. The x-rays, statue, blade, gold tablet, tomb and gruesome beast, through their reception are all given a voice and space, and although their discourse may remain hidden and silenced by the discourse of the dominant order, that of rationality and fact, they gain a stronger voice through their reproduction as image, reinforcing the link between the past and present, demonstrating that the two are inextricably linked. 34  One could speculate that it found its way to the museum after having being donated by the Guarnacci family. How the family gained possession of the piece remains hidden in the ‘archives’ of time (see footnote 10). 35  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?” in Patrick William, and Laura Christman (eds.), Colonial Discourses and Post-Colonial Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) 66–112. 36  “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, Diacritics 25.2 (1995) 9–63 [http://www.jstor.org/ stable/465144]. 37  A. Gustafsson, “Beware the Invisible”, Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 20 (2010) 107.

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According to Barthes, ‘a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theoretical’ meaning, (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’.38 Similar to the embellished object pieced together by the master restorer, in Chimaira (2001) / The Ancient Curse (2010) the multi-dimensionality of this space is explored and populated by echoes of myth and ancient practice that resonates and overpowers the present in a shock-wave that makes the reader question the theoretical meaning of the text as well as reassess concepts of space and time and how we interact with history. Through its definition as a mystery/detective novel, Chimaira (2001) / The Ancient Curse (2010) also explores areas of a closely related genre, that of the thriller/gothic novel. Features of this genre as defined by Allan Lloyd-Smith include: Extreme situations, anxiety, darkness, threat, paranoia; exaggerated villains and innocent victims; subterfuge and plots; ancient houses, castles, monasteries, dungeons, crypts and passages, wild scenery, craggy mountains or winding maze-like tracts; stage machinery, hidden trapdoors, secret passageways; speaking portraits, ghosts, doubles, and other supernatural-seeming beings; monstrous and grotesque creatures; pain, terror, horror and sadism.39 Although the image of the tomb is central to the plot of the novel, what resonates throughout the narrative is the theme of the ‘innocent victim’. It is through the exploration of this theme that the received story from the past incites the narrative to the question of what Haynes describes as ‘moral action’. The primary victims of Lars Thyrrens’ are three: Anait, Velies and Turm Kaiknas, and while the plot revolves around the avengance of Turm Kaiknas’ brutal death, it is the image of Velies, the child in the shadows, that predominates and is key to the resolution of the mystery. The manifestation of the ghost child Velies is present in the narrative of ‘present’ in the form of the bronze statue,40 he is also manifest in the character of the orphaned child Angelo that Fabrizio finds lurching in the shadows at Le Macine and who leads the protagonist to finding the crucial missing piece of the gold slab that 38  Bob Ashley, (ed.), Reading Popular Narratives: A Sourcebook (Leister: Leister University Press, 1997) 133. 39  Allen Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2004) 133. 40  An object both real and narrative and presumed to be of dubious origin given its history.

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contains the curse.41 All that is known about Angelo is that he is an orphan and that he lives with his sinister step-mother in the derelict tavern, Le Macine, and according to him she abuses him.42 Kerényi (2002:32) in his ‘The Primordial Child in Primordial Times’ notes that, ‘the child god is usually an abandoned foundling … Often … threatened by extraordinary dangers’. Angelo is not a god, but then neither is Velies, yet their roles in the novel are ‘god-like’ for they become, past and present, the meters-out of justice: Velies as the ‘archive’ of the blade, and Angelo, the foundling, as the ‘revealer’ of the second and crucial part of the gold slab that discloses that: The beast will continue to kill [as long as] there is blood [to drink] in Velathri [Only] if the beast is separated from the man Will the vengeance be served [be placated] [Only] if the son is [returned] to the father.43 It is here that the reception of the past as inspiration towards ‘moral action’ as described by Heyens come to the fore: the action in the novel it is not only a means of righting a wrong of the past, the unjust ‘murder’ of Turm Kaiknas through trial by phersu but also a means by which the interrogation of our ‘moral actions’ towards issues of the illicit trafficking of antiquities can be questioned. Both the statue and Angelo through the narrative become ‘found’ objects with little in the way of certain origin, yet both prove useful in the unravelling of the mystery. Referring back to Gustafsson’s argument in ‘Beware the Invisible’, although the action of looting may be criminalised, the looted object can still tell a story:

41  Both the child Angelo and the statue are displaced objects, taken / looted from their home, yet both play a significant role in solving the temporal mysteries. The subaltern, both past and present, are given a voice through the narrative. 42  It is evident in the narrative that Angelo is in many ways a reception of the Etruscan childgod Tages. This aspect however will not be covered as it falls outside the scope of the present discussion. The link is explored extensively in an article soon to be published in the journal Italian Studies in Southern Africa (May/June 2016) entitled, ‘Questions of ‘home’ and ‘origin’ in Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s Chimaira (2001) and The Ancient Curse (2010)’. 43  Manfredi (2010) 211. La belva continuerà a uccidere [finchè] resterà sangue [da bere?] a Velathri / [Solo] se la belva è separata dall’uomo la vendetta si arresta [si placa] / [Solo] se il figlio è [restituito] al padre. (Manfredi (2001) 214).

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When interpreting an illegally traded antiquity that has no similar objects it can be compared with and no traces remaining of its origins, we can only find out more about its history if we are open to wider possibilities and opening our minds some more.44 Similarly, the reception of the ancient past in popular fiction may be deemed as ‘looting’ but, as in the case of Chimaira (2001) / The Ancient Curse (2010), the settling of ‘ancient accounts from the past’ can only be achieved through reading what is not there, finding the traces in the spaces left by the ancient text / object. Like the spaces of the fragmented amphora and its decoration, they are filled by what the restorer can objectively reveal. The actual happenings and reasons behind the murders are hidden by the ‘archive’ as the true translation of the tablet, like the looted object, is never shown to the public: ‘The inscription will be hung on the wall in the museum and show only the Etruscan side. The complete translation is in the hands of a notary, who will keep it locked in a safety deposit box for some time”.45 And although the voice of the subaltern, the ancient objects and texts, is heard, it remains in the shadows of the narrative, their story told through the voices of the characters and events of present for the past can only be told through present. The description of l’ombra della sera / The Shade of Twilight as Gemito’s street urchins and Giacometti’s bronzes fades, and the reader is left with the shadowy image of the Etruscan bronze, long, fragile and ephemeral, casting its shadow in the halls of a museum ready to inspire another story as time and the human imagination changes and shapes its (hi)stories. Bibliography Airaghi, P., L’ombra della sera, la scultura etrusca conservata nel museo Guarnacci a Volterra: raccolta di studi sull ipotesi di Piero Airaghi (Italy: Rho, 1988). Ashley, Bob (ed.), Reading Popular Narratives: A Sourcebook (Leister: Leister University Press, 1997). Benjamin, W., The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility [First Version]. Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010) 11–37. Browne, Ray B. and Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. (eds.), The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). 44  Gustafsson (2010) 97. 45  Manfredi (2010) 246.

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Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976). Derrida, Jacques, Positions (trans. Alan Bass) (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981). Derrida Jacques, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, Diacritics 25.2 (1995) 9–63 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/465144]. Di Martino, Ugo., Gli Etruschi (Milano: Mursia, 2000). Graisser, J. H., “The Reception of Classical Texts in the Renaissance”, in Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (eds.), The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002) 387–400. Grieco Allen J., Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (eds.), The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002). Gustafsson, A., “Beware the Invisible”, Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 20 (2010) 97–110, doi: 10.5334/pia.343 Haynes, Kenneth, “Text, Theory and Reception” in Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (eds.), Classics and the Uses of Reception (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) 44–54. Hühn, P., “The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction”, MFS Modern Fiction Studies 33.3 (1987) 451–466. doi:https://doi.org / 10.1353/ mfs.0.1310 Jung, Carl G. & Carl Kerényi, Science of Mythology: Essays on the Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis (trans. R.F.C. Hull) (London: Routledge, 2002). Kankpeyeng, Benjamin W. and Christopher R. DeCorse, “Ghana’s Vanishing Past: Development, Antiquities and the Destruction of the Archaeological Record”, African Archaeological Review 21(2) (2004) 89–128, doi:10.1023/B:AARR.0000030786. 24067.19 Kittelson, Mary Lynn, “Editor’s Introduction”, in idem (ed.), The Soul of Popular Culture (Chicago: Open Court, 1998) 1–17. Leong, L. W-T., “Cultural Resistance: The Cultural Terrorism of British Male WorkingClass Youth”, Current Perspectives in Social Theory 12 (1992) 29–58. Lloyd-Smith, A., American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2004). Manfredi, V.M., L’oracolo (Milano: Arnaldo Mondadori, 1990). Manfredi, V.M., La torre della solitudine (Milano: Arnaldo Mondadori, 1996). Manfredi, V.M., Il faraone delle sabbie (Milano: Arnaldo Mondadori, 1998). Manfredi, V.M., Chimaira (Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 2001). Manfredi, V.M., Alexander: The End of the Earth (London: Pan Macmillan, 2002). Manfredi, V.M., The Oracle (trans. Christine Feddersen-Manfredi) (London: Pan Macmillan, 2005). Manfredi, V.M., The Tower (trans. Christine Feddersen-Manfredi) (London: Pan Macmillan, 2006).

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Manfredi, V.M., Pharaoh (trans. Christine Feddersen-Manfredi) (London: Pan Macmillan, 2008). Manfredi, V.M., The Ancient Curse (London: Pan Macmillan, 2010). Manzoni, A., On the Historical Novel (trans. Sandra Bermann Lincoln) (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). Martindale, Charles, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Martindale, Charles, “Introduction”, in Charles Martindale, and Richard F. Thomas, (eds.), Classics and the Uses of Reception (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). Miller, Toby, “Introduction”, in idem (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2015) 1–13. Pallottino, Massimo, The Etruscans (London: Penguin Books, 1955). Said, Aleya A., “Two tales of one Alexander”, Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, 2.2 (2009) 86–95. Sánchez, Manel García,  “La representacion del Gran Rey aqueménida en la novella história Contemporánea”, Historiae (2005) 91–113. Semerano, Giovanni, Il popolo che sconfisse la morte (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2003). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty “Can the subaltern speak?” in Patrick William, and Laura Christman (eds.), Colonial Discourses and Post-Colonial Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) 66–112. Weinstock, Stefan, “Martianus Capella and the Cosmic System of the Etruscans”, The Journal of Roman Studies 36 (1946) 101–129.

Part 2 Rewriting the Ancient World in a Modern Setting

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CHAPTER 4

Going Home: Xenophon’s Anabasis in Sol Yurick’s The Warriors (1965) Eran Almagor Xenophon’s story of the Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries at the service of the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger against his brother the Great King Artaxerxes II and their journey homeward after the death of Cyrus, including adventures in Asia Minor is well known among classicists and others. It was narrated in his work Anabasis (literally, “journey up-country”), recounting his experiences as a young soldier, and has been repeatedly told ever since.1 Capturing the imagination of many a reader, one of the manners it has been recast through the ages has been as a story of triumphal perseverance amidst dangers and hostile adversaries, culminating in the famous cry of the Ten Thousand mercenaries “Thalatta! Thalatta!” (“The Sea! The Sea!”, Xen. Anab. 4.7.24)—reflecting 1  Reception in antiquity: Diod. 14.37.1–3 and 14.19–31 with P. J. Stylianou, “One Anabasis or Two?”, in R. Lane Fox (ed.), The Long March. Xenophon and the Ten Thousand (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004) 68–96; Plut. Art. 8.1; Arr. Anabasis Alexandrou (homage to the work in the title, language and style) with E. L. Bowie, “Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic”, Past & Present, 46 (1970) 3–41 [27]; A. B. Bosworth, From Arrian to Alexander (Oxford: OUP, 1988) 135–156; Eunapius, VPS, 452–3. See in general K. Münscher, Xenophon in der griechisch-römischen Literatur, Philologus Suppl. 13/2 (Leipzig 1920); I. Pérez Martín, “The Reception of Xenophon in Byzantium: The Macedonian Period”, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013) 812–855; L. Pernot, “La reception antique de Xénophon : quel modèle pour quels orateurs?”, in P. Pontier (ed.), Xénophon et la rhétorique, (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2014) 281–294. Modern reception: see T. Rood, The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination (London:  Duckworth, 2004); id. American Anabasis: Xenophon and the Idea of America from the Mexican War to Iraq (London:  Duckworth, 2010); id. “A Delightful Retreat: Xenophon and the Picturesque” in F. Hobden, C.J. Tuplin (eds.), Xenophon: Ethical Principles and Historical Enquiry (Leiden: Brill 2012) 89–112. In particular, see Jules Verne, Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864), XXX; Saint-John Perse’s Anabase (1924); Andre Norton’s Star Guard (1955); Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (1978); Harold Coyle’s The Ten Thousand (1993); Ellen Gilchrist’s Anabasis (1994); Paul Davies’ Grace: A Story (1996), Michael Curtis Ford’s The Ten Thousand (2001), John Ringo’s The Last Centurion (2008), Paul Kearney’s The Ten Thousand (2008), Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s The Lost Army (2008) and many more. I would like to thank Lisa Maurice for her wonderful organization and work on the conference and on this volume.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004346383_006

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the excitement of the soldiers upon the sight of the Black Sea, a place roughly within the area considered as “home”.2 Yet, the story assumed a different context and importance in the first fictional novel of the author Sol (Solomon) Yurick (18.1.1925–5.1.2013), called The Warriors (1965).3 The novel proved to be Yurick’s most memorable and popular novel.4 The popular aspect of Yurick’s novel is important in that it provides a varied and manifold audience with widespread access to a text and a story that so far has been seen as exclusively known by a small group, usually of higher social classes. This is in line with the thought of Walter Benjamin,5 who positively saw popular accessibility as conducive in removing the exclusive “aura” component accompanying previous works of art; this process was regarded as tantamount to a democratization of arts and the liberation of imagination and has been portrayed as a ‘democratic turn’, in which the Classics were taken down from a cultural Mount Olympus, as it were, and from the connotation of elitist Classics and the superior scriptores classici (Aul. Gel. NA 19.8.15), to be discussed in modern new contexts and as received by less privileged groups.6

2  When the soldiers see the Pontus from Mt. Theches, they immediately erect a great trophy (4.7.25–26), as if symbolizing their triumph in surviving. See J. Dillery, Xenophon and the History of His Times (London: Routledge, 1995) 76–77. 3  First published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Yurick was born into a working class family of communist and trade-union politically active Jewish immigrants from Russia / Lithuania. He was enlisted in the US army in 1944, trained as a surgical technician, but medically discharged in 1945. During his literature studies in New York University, he first came up with the idea of using the Anabasis story to relate a story of modern day street gangs. (Eric Homberger, “Sol Yurick Obituary”, The Guardian, 7 January 2013). 4  Following the success of The Warriors (1965), Yurick published the previously written novel Fertig (1966), concentrating on the inadequate American healthcare and legal system, when the death of Fertig’s son as a result of a New York hospital’s negligence triggers a trail of murders by the grief stricken father (itself the basis of the movie The Confession, 1999). Yurick’s The Bag (1968) was composed during his increasing political activity against the war in Vietnam and in association with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Yurick was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972) and continued to write (Someone Just Like You, 1973 is a collection of short stories; An Island Death, 1976; Richard A, 1981; Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel, 1985), while being engaged in ideologically laden projects (a socialist alternative board game to Monopoly, a detective story aiming to disclose the innocence of the Rosenbergs). Homberger (2013). 5  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in id. Illuminations (London: Fontana 1992) 211–44. 6  L. Hardwick and C. Stray, “Introduction” in L. Hardwick and C. Stray (eds.), A Companion to Classical Receptions (Malden, MA: Blackwell-Wiley, 2008) 1–12 [3]. Less privileged groups: see E. Hall, “Putting the Class into Classical Reception” in Hardwick and Stray (2008) 386–397.

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The novel was to become the basis for the hit and cult movie of the same name by Walter Hill (1979).7 This chapter will address the transformation that the world of the Ten Thousand undergoes to the modern grim street gang universe(s) of The Warriors, including the interplay of facts and fiction.

Lost … And Home Again

Cyrus the Younger took Xenophon and the other Greek mercenaries into the heart of the Persian Empire, when he enlisted the Ten Thousand and the Spartan soldiers in 401 BCE to assist him in his desire to oust the king.8 Sol Yurick took Xenophon even further away from home. Yurick removed the plot spatially to the street gangs of a fantastic Bronx in New York, and temporally to sometime in a futuristic Fourth of July. Yurick never denied the fact that “The Warriors” is an adaptation of the Anabasis. We are fortunate to have his own version of the creative process that has led to the composition of The Warriors. In the afterword to the 2003 paperback edition, a section called “How I Came to Write The Warriors and What Happened After” (183–212), he recalls the inception of the idea. This and the following sections from this afterword enable us to have to rare glimpse at the meaning given by the modern author to his created fictional world and its relation to Classical literature:

7  On the book see D. Graham, “Naturalism and the Revolutionary Imperative: Sol Yurick’s The Warriors”, Critique 18 (1976) 119–28. Other producers were interested in making the book into a movie, among them Otto Preminger. I have written a chapter on the movie for E. Almagor and L. Maurice (eds.) Ancient Virtues and Vices in Modern Popular Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2017) 103–39. 8  Cf. Xen. Anab. 1.1.2, 1.1.6–11, 1.2.1, 1.2.6, Hell. 3.1.1; Diod. 14.11.2, 14.12.6–9, 14.19.4, 14.21.1–2; Plut. Art. 4.2, 6.1–5, Mor. 173f. See H. W. Parke, Greek Mercenary Soldiers (Oxford: OUP, 1933) 23–29: a novel project in its scope and aims; G. T. Griffith, The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (Cambridge: CUP 1934) 264–6, 295, 308; J. Roy, “The Mercenaries of Cyrus”, Historia, 16 (1967) 287–323 [297, 300, 309–316]; L. P. Marinovic, Le Mercenariat grec au IVe siècle avant notre ère et la crise de la Polis (Trans. J. and Y. Garlan) (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1988) 141–7, 153–6, 243. Famously, the soldiers numbered approximately ten thousand (Xen. Anab. 1.7.10, Diod. 14.19.7, Plut. Art. 6.5: 12,9000/ 13,000) and were thus called (Xen. Hell. 3.2.7) or the “Cyreans” (Plut. Ages. 9.2; Ant. 45.6; Arr. Anab. 1.12.3; 2.7.8; 4.11.9; Polyaenus 1.49.1; Ath. 11.505a; Them. Or. 33.10.2). See R. J. Bonner, “The name ‘Ten Thousand.’ ” CPh 5 (1910) 97–9; M.P. Masqueray, “Origine de l’expression les ‘Dix-Mille’ ”, CRAI 1 (1928) 111–115; Roy (1967) 287, 296–302; Marinovic (1988) 28–32. The Greeks were secretly enlisted under various pretexts in separate units, and were not told the real goal for the recruitment till they reached the Euphrates (Xen. Anab. 1.4.11). Actual payment to the soldiers occurred only once (Xen. Anab. 1.2.11–12).

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I think the elements for The Warriors began to come together sometimes during the ’50. I was having a talk with a friend of mine, a writer whose mother and father had been successful Hollywood script writers. He was trying to explain to me what constituted a good idea (the “high concept”) for a script. Almost as a joke, I hit upon the notion of a story of a fighting gang based on, or paralleling, the course of The Anabasis. Once uttered, I dropped the idea. I thought the notion was ingenious, but not really serious. Yet I didn’t forget it … (187)9 The creative process is a mystery. I conceived the whole plot in one glowing moment. Well, in fact the plot—or rather the motif—had been lying around for thousands of years: the hero journey through adversities, mental or material or both. And the plot of this journey was waiting for me for some twenty-four hundred years. (196) Yurick began working as a social investigator in the New York Department of Welfare in 1954, when he encountered the city streets’ gang life.10 Interested in the topic of fighting gangs seen as “veritable armies”11 and in the structure and community of the city gangs, he explored it himself (Yurick traveled on foot through the subway tunnel between 96th Street and 110th Street, New York, a gang controlled area).12 The material was to become the basis of his fictional novel, more realistic than romanticized depictions of gang life in popular culture (like West Side Story).13 For his composition on adolescent gangs, Yurick drew inspiration from Irving Shulman’s The Amboy Dukes (1947) and Evan Hunter’s The Blackboard Jungle (1954).14 In fact, Yurick’s aim was that his book would echo the Anabasis,15 as he knew it in the Penguin edition (translated by

9   Yurick (2003) 195 claims that the idea of The Warriors had lingered in his mind for about fifteen years. 10  William Yardley, “Sol Yurick, 87, Author of ‘The Warriors’ Gang Novel”, The New York Times, 9 January 2013. According to another account, Yurick was fascinated by Constantinople’s gangs of the 14th Century AD clashing with Imperial troops for five days (Gareth Jones at the Warriors Movie Site, , last accessed January 2016). 11  Richard Sheridan, “In Memoriam”, Brooklyn College Magazine 2 (Spring 2013) 39. 12  Homberger (2013). Yurick (2003) 199 (“scary”). 13  On Yurick’s naturalism see Graham (1976), id., “Naturalism in American Fiction: A Status Report”, Studies in American Fiction 10 (Spring 1982) 1–16 [3, 6]. Cf. A. Marasso, Ashes of Gold: loss of innocence and rites of passage: selected tales from 1950’s Hollywood rebels to 1960’s youth gangs (MA Thesis, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, 2013/4) 51. 14  Cf. D. B. Graham, “Interview with Sol Yurick”, Philadelphia (February 1973). 15  “I wanted the book to be exciting and popular, but to parallel the Greek classic, Anabasis”. A. Auster and D. Georgakas, “The Warriors: An Interview with Sol Yurick”, Cinéaste 9 (1979) 22–24 [22].

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Rex Warner).16 The story and journey were to replicate those of the original text of Xenophon: When I saw the relevance of the two different ‘texts’, fighting gangs and the kid-mercenaries of The Anabasis, from two different times, in two different ‘languages’ from two different cultures, to one another I think I saw something no one else had seen. This was not a natural given. So to some extent it had to be forced … [the small gang] would have to, like the Greek ten thousand, fight their way through hostile territories ruled by other gangs to their home grounds … Like the Greeks, they would finally reach the ‘Black Sea’, only, in this case, it was the Atlantic Ocean off Coney Island … (198–9). The plot of The Warriors (written by Yurick in two or three weeks, as he claimed17) is briefly the following: On the evening of the Fourth of July, the leader of the largest street gang in New York, the Delancey Thrones, whose name is Ismael Rivera, assembles all New York gangs to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx (7–43).18 They arrive unarmed, apart from a handgun each, which they are to deliver as a peace offering to Ismael (41, 53). The story focuses on one group, the Dominators (also referred to as “the Family”) from Coney Island, a racially mixed African American/Hispanic gang. Its members are the leader Papa Arnold (Father = first in command), Hector (Uncle = second in command), Bimbo (Bearer, i.e., the one who carries alcohol), Lunkface (Eldest son), The Junior (Kid brother), Dewey (Second brother), and Hinton (Third brother, called Jim or James, the artist, the one who leaves the gang’s sign at various places), the central figure of the novel.19 Ismael, admirably called “The Man” (34–5, 38) proposes a general truce between the gangs, in order to unite against “the Other” (36, 39). In the ensuing confusion and the arrival of the police, the assembly breaks up; Ismael is shot twice, once in his body and once in his eye, by other gang members, in the belief that he led them into a trap.20 The leader of the 16  Xenophon, The Persian Expedition (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1949), later reprinted in 1972 with an introduction by G.L. Cawkwell. Yet, Yurick presumably also read the translation of W.H.D. Rouse, Xenophon, The Anabasis: The March Up Country (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958). See Yurick (2003) 184. Yurick began to study Homeric Greek but dropped out after one month. 17  Samuel Fromartz, “Remembering Sol Yurick”, The Nation (16 January 2013). Yurick (2003) 195. 18  The page numbers refer to the 2003 paperback reprint edition. 19  Hinton reappears also as a major figure in Yurick’s The Bag (1968). 20  The figure of Ismael reappears again in his The Bag, as a dejected one eyed drug addict and rent collector for a landlord (Faust). In the latter novel, Ismael collects rifles to be

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Dominators, Papa Arnold, disappears, leaving the gang to be led back to Coney Island and their home turf by Hector. Since he previously lived in the neighborhood, Hinton’s role is crucial in guiding the gang out of Woodlawn Cemetery (3, 49, 54). Because of works on the tracks, the gang cannot take the subway train home and has to head to a different station. Entering through a territory of a Puerto Rican gang, the Borinquen Blazers, Hector asks their leader Jesus Mendez for a safe passage (83–88). Soon, however, matters get out of hand, when the Dominators refuse to remove their insignia (stolen Mercedes Benz car symbols placed on the gang members’ hats as pins) and proceed as enemies of the Blazers (88–92). Two violent scenes follow after the gang ambush a scout from the Blazers, taking his switchblade knife, and persuade a girl of the Blazers who had followed them to accompany them with the promise of membership (as “sister”). In the first scene, the members of the gang stab a bystander with the switchblade, as the girl encourages them to do so; in the second they gang-rape the girl, with the dead man’s body being used as her headrest, and leave her in the street (98–102). While waiting for the subway train, as well as during the ride, the gang holds contests of “manhood”; one which Hinton wins is that of putting their heads outside the train until it reaches the tunnel (103–114). When they encounter police, the gang disperses in various directions (116– 120). Hector, Lunkface and Bimbo run into Riverside Park, where they meet a drunken nurse. After having intercourse with the three, she resents Bimbo’s going through her purse and cries rape; although they flee the scene, they are caught by the police (135–149). Hinton reaches the designated meeting place (Times Square station) first, and spends time having sex with a prostitute, eating and winning (twice) a shootout game with a dummy sheriff, thus satisfying his needs all by his own, without the gang (160–165). Hinton meets Dewey and Junior and leads them to Coney Island, where he wishes to provoke a clash with a rival gang (the Lords). As the Lords do not reply, Hinton declares victory by drawing on the wall of the hangout place of his rival gang (166–172). The three learn from Arnold’s girlfriend that he has returned hours before. Dewey and Junior leave with their girlfriends, but Hinton goes home alone (176). As he arrives, his mother, Minnie, is engaged in sex with her boyfriend, and Hinton takes care of the baby (177–181).21 The book ends with Hinton talking to his

used when the low people will rise against their oppressors. This is presumably a tongue in cheek intertextual reference to Ismael’s fall from glory. 21  Minnie and Hinton’s brother, Alonso the addict, reappear as figures in Yurick’s The Bag. Minnie will appear in Yurick’s short story “The Annealing” in Someone Just Like You (1973).

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half-brother Alonso and sleeping in the fire escape, in a regressive, almost fetal, position, with his thumb in mouth. To readers familiar with Xenophon’s work, it would seem clear that Yurick makes the presence of the Anabasis evidenced through the skeleton of the plot. The Dominators’ entrance into an unknown territory, the death of the powerful person who invited them, the loss of their leader and their hapless position while attempting to return home—are all reminiscent of the Greek soldiers’ experience: the latter were led into the heart of the Persian Empire, lost the leader who enlisted them (Cyrus the Younger), lost their commanders through a ruse by the Persians, and struggled to return to the familiar Greek surrounding. The feeling of being lost is enhanced in Ismael’s words (36–7).22 After Ismael’s assembly breaks up, and the initial cause fails, all the physical and psychic energy of the gang members is devoted to the pursuit of survival. It would seem that they now encounter situations for which they have never been trained and prepared. We learn through a cop’s stream of consciousness (23) that they have never before left their familiar neighborhood and world. In the immediate aftermath of Ismael’s death, everything seemed unfamiliar and threatening: “now there was no place to run and hide, no doorway to disappear into; only the unfamiliar field, the blackness itself” (42).23 The situation of Dominators as being stranded is also voiced by others: Another loud-speaker started giving orders to the boys, yelling at groups that were trying to make their escape, telling them that flight was useless; they were surrounded. (46) This sense of being displaced is stressed by Yurick, describing the Dominators’ position as “half-running through the darkness”, not knowing where they are going, drifting north, west and east until “they were lost, moving up and down hills, through marshy land, panting” (48). Later on they would feel trapped, unable to understand the working of the trains and hearing “impossible-tounderstand sentences” from the loud speaker (77). A sense of complete loss is

22  “He told them they were all lost, lost from the beginning and lost now, lost till their deaths. If they were lucky, they would make a quick end and if they were not, they would drag it on, child surrounded, like their parents, being nothing more or less than put-down and fit-in machine parts … They nodded. They knew it.” 23  Again this is foreshadowed by Ismael’s presaging wisdom (35): “He knew they moved there in the darkness frightened by their strange surroundings, ready to break and run, always nervous when they were away from their own turf.”

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again described: “They didn’t know where they were. They didn’t know whose country they were in, but they knew they were in trouble” (80).24 At the end, when they reach Coney Island, Hinton points at the Atlantic (174). After yelling “The Ocean!”, Dewey and Junior repeat “The Ocean, The Ocean!” and they all laugh hysterically, recognizing they arrived home (174). The theme of displacement, the sense of danger and the feeling of triumph for having overcome it through courage and inventiveness by reaching the sea— which means home—are all carefully made to correspond to Xenophon’s story of the march of the Ten Thousand back to the Greek speaking world.25 There are also some other hinted analogies. Yurick lets Ismael explicitly use the word “mercenaries” (36) to refer to his men whom he hires out “to help other gangs in their rumbles” (rather than the other way around). Moreover, Hinton, the artist and protagonist of the story, may resemble Xenophon the author/artist. Like Xenophon, the Athenian soldier who later turned historian, Hinton seemingly wishes to tell others his story.26 The Anabasis is even referred to explicitly within the book. It begins (p. v) with two epigraphs from Xenophon in the reverse order in which they appear in the original. The first is taken from Xenophon’s speech after a defeat of the rebel Mossynoecians, people who were allies of the Greeks, and after the Greeks took to flight in great number, something they had not done before in the course of the expedition (5.4.19): Soldiers, you must not be downhearted because of recent events. I can assure you that there are as many advantages as disadvantages in what has happened.27 24  Displacement is seen through the element of the subway, with its unreadable maps; cf. T. Newhouse, The Beat Generation and the Popular Novel in the United States, 1945–1970 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2000) 46–47; cf. Marasso (2013/4) 22. 25  For the theme of displacement in the Anabasis, see J. Ma, “You Can’t Go Home Again: Displacement and Identity in Xenophon’s Anabasis”, in Lane Fox (2004) 330–45. Pace A.J. Pomeroy, Then It Was Destroyed by the Volcano: The Ancient World in Film and Television (London: Duckworth. 2008) 22–23, who sees the Anabasis as a mere “Classical antecedent” to Yurick’s novel. Cf. the review of W. Briggs, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 17 (2010) 156- 161 [158]. 26  pp. 179–80: “unable to stop the excitement of having to show Alonso what he had done that night, he said, “Man, you know what happened tonight? You know where I’ve been? You know what I did?”. 27  The rest of Xenophon’s exhortation speech (Anab. 5.4.19–21) emphasizes Greek military discipline. The words are extremely important against the background of the gang group

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The second passage, like the first, concerns another external group who is perceived as an obstacle for the Greeks on their way home, the Colchians. Xenophon’s advice that the Greeks should pass through their territory in spaced columns and not in the battle formation of the phalanx was accepted. His words (twenty-four in all) to the rear (left wing) soon followed (Anab. 4.8.14): My friends, these people whom you see are the last obstacle which stops us from being where we have so long struggled to be. We ought, if we could, to eat them up alive.28 The use of the latter quotation is subtly inventive, since it portrays the Greeks as “others”, “outsiders”, presumably like the gang members would be viewed by the surrounding society.29 The citation of the epigraphs was not Yurick’s own, but rather the idea of his publisher,30 thus providing the first instance of cohesion, stressed in the novel: “those … who took little thought of the battle formation we use and got the idea that they could accomplish the same results in company with the barbarians as they could with us, have paid the penalty—another time they will be less likely to leave our ordered lines.” (Translated by C.L. Brownson and O.J. Todd for the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1932). On this speech and its type in Xenophon’s work, see D. Gera, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia: Style, Genre, and Literary Technique (Oxford: OUP, 1993) 111; E. Anson, “The General’s Pre-Battle Exhortation in Graeco-Roman Warfare”, Greece & Rome, 57 (2010) 304–318; S. Brown Ferrario, Historical Agency and the ‘Great Man’ in Classical Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) 196. The alliance with the Mossynoecians is perhaps alluded to in the reference to Junior’s comic book on page 133: “The leader of the Greeks, cool in a gold glinting helmet with a wavy-fur chest, was trying to parley with the savage leader of the hill tribesmen.” 28  On the imagery, cf. Il. 4.34–35: Zeus addresses Hera and tells her to eat Priam, his children and the other Trojans raw to satiate her anger; cf. 24.212. The words were presumably repeated by Xenophon to each unit. See M.H. Hansen, “The Battle Exhortation in Ancient Historiography: Fact or Fiction?” Historia 42 (1993) 161–180. Note that in the novel, when the Dominators pass through the territory of others, Hinton stays with the rear, as Xenophon (97). 29  Dillery (1995) 76: “an exhortation that has a good Homeric pedigree, but which nonetheless represents a startling inversion of Greek and barbarian custom at the very point when the Ten Thousand finally reach the Greek world.” 30  Graham (1973). Cf. Yurick (2003) 205: “My editor did serve one useful, indeed vital, function: he chose the introductory quotes from Xenophon. At the time I couldn’t realize how important these quotes were to the making of the reputation of the book. Without these quotes, how would anyone know about its classical parallel.” Yurick then goes on to compare the example of Ulysses and the Odyssey.

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a reader’s response to Yurick subtle allusions to the Anabasis in his novel. This overt allusion gives a clearer key to decipher the text as related to Xenophon.31 There are evident allusions to the Anabasis throughout the story for readers who know the plot of the Greek classical work. Junior is said to read a comic book version of it: The Junior took out his comic book and started to read. The Junior didn’t follow the words too well unless they were printed big, or dark. But he could follow the whole action from the pictures. It was about ancient soldiers, Greeks, heroes who had to fight their way home through many obstacles, but in the end they made it. He had enjoyed reading it so much that it was the third time he was going through (106–107). The reference to the Anabasis is presented as a tongue in cheek allusion,32 when Junior fails to observes the similarity of his own journey with that of the Greeks: The Junior had followed the adventure story through the pictures. They had fought every inch of the way; the heroes were on the way home. The heroes were, The Junior could see, the hardest men in a hard world, admirable but, he thought, he wouldn’t like to be in their place, even though he envied their adventures. (114) The readers who are provided at the outset with citation of the epigraphs from the Anabasis, are led to pick up the irony of The Junior’s unawareness. The Junior is indeed later said to imagine himself in the place of Greek heroes (133), “putting the spear point to the enemy fuzz—a bull in blue armor wearing a steel helmet, with a New York City shield … charging down on them.” He also entertained the thought that the Family wore crazy hair crest helmets like the Greeks (134). The irony is manifest to the readers when the indirect depiction of the Greek hero’s request to pass in peace (“they had come in peace, and they wanted to pass in peace, and they were marching through”) quickly turns to a direct quotation, presumably reflecting The Junior’s phrasing (“and if we have to waste you, we waste. If you come down on us, it’s on your head because we wanted peace. Remember.”)—words that closely echo Hector’s expression when the Dominators wished to pass through the territory of the Blazers (88: “We’re going through in peace, remember that, man … remember, we’re 31  Graham (1976) 120. 32  Graham (1976) 121.

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moving in peace”; cf. 97). Is it reality which imitates art or art that imitates reality?33 Ironic also is the fact that Dewey, the only member who notices what The Junior is reading something, does not realize the similar situation (133–4), commenting only on the irrelevance of spears. As they are nearer the end of the journey, a reference in the comic book to the Battle of Cunaxa, in which Cyrus the Younger died (167)34 echoes the beginning of the external story in the novel (in which Ismael died). In reverse order, during their predicament earlier on, The Junior is concentrated on his comic book and has to look up when he reaches a panel “showing the grinning faces of the Greek heroes as they saw The Sea. The Sea” (107–8). Wishing to wipe an “invisible” chocolate stain from his fingers, Lunkface tore a piece of The Junior’s comic book; “[h]e paid no attention to The Junior’s angry yell” (109). Why a comic book? In the afterword mentioned above, Yurick claims (198) that this medium was the “the immediate mediational ground upon which fighting gangs met The Anabasis”. Yurick refers to the Classic Comics, which already had illustrations of the Iliad or the adventures of the Argonauts, but not of the Anabasis, “which was too esoteric, but would have made a great comic book”.35 A comic book, asserts Yurick, was presumably “the only material gang members might have read”. It could have presented the Greek warriors as the kind of heroic cartoon figures with whom to identify. Yurick later regretted the explicit references and allusions to the Anabasis, asserting that he would leave out the comic-book allusions, as the milieu is less given to drawing analogues.36 Yet, without the overt connection to the Anabasis, this would have been another tale of juvenile delinquents. Only with this association does the story gain momentum for the expected readers and only this way nuances are disclosed in the teens’ behavior, which we would not have noticed otherwise.37 33  The mention of the “silver of the spears almost glinted and the red of the blood stood out very clearly” in the comic book (134) evokes the memory of the recent murder the Family members committed in real life. 34  “[T]he part about where the big battle had taken place in front of Babylon and the leader of the Rebel army had been slain and the Greek heroes were trying to decide what they would do now.” 35  In fact, the Classics Illustrated volume of The March of the Ten Thousand appeared in 1964 in German, Swedish and Dutch (# 165 or 170) and in English for the first time in the 1980’s (JES = Joint European Series # 28). 36  Graham (1973). 37  Cf. Yurick (2003) 200: “whatever I thought about rhetorical devices, parallels, literary references, I was determined to bury them in such a way that they would work subliminally

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Regardless of Yurick’s own interpretation, the metaleptic self-reference to the story within the story is subtle and clever. It led Rood (2005: 187) to speak here of an instance of a mise en abyme.38 Indeed, the transition from a textual form into a graphic construct which is described in the text involves a reversal of media like the one occurring in an ekphrasis depiction, that is, a vivid description of a visible object.39 The medium of comics, placed as it is between the written and the graphic and defined by the special relations between word and image40 enables the story of the Anabasis to be at once real and virtual. Note that the chocolate stain is as virtual (“invisible”) as the plot of the story written on paper which wipes it. The metapoetic idea of a mismatch of literature (here, comics) and real life and the notion of a discrepancy between the past and the future echo the content of Xenophon’s tale of displacement (Greeks in a foreign surrounding). Of importance here is the sequence of the two scenes: first the arrival at the sea, and then the recounting of the circumstances of the Greeks’ fight to reach home through many obstacles. Another trait of the comic strip’s form is the remarkable relation of words and images, where none gets the precedence.41 As the reader’s eye constantly shifts between the graphic and the textual in a comic book,42 it can move between past and future events (parallel to non-chronological sequence of the first scenes in The Warriors).

on the minds of the literate reader. If you missed the references, then you had, I hoped, a good story.” 38  The use of the medium of comics is surely not accidental. On mise en abyme in the French comic style books, the francophone bande dessinée, see A. Miller, Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip (Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 2007) 139–41. 39  Cf. E. Almagor, “Reinventing the Barbarian: Reshaping Classical Ethnographic Perceptions in Goscinny’s and Uderzo’s Astérix”, in G. Kovacs and T. Marshall (eds.), Son of Classics and Comics (Oxford: OUP, 2016) 113–129 [121]. For instance, the prologue to Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, where the narrator describes a painting adorned with the same story of love. 40  Almagor (2016). See S. McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 46–7, 92, 96–7, 138–161 on the language of Comics as composed of pictures and words, and is “showing” as well as “telling”. 41  Cf. T. Bridgeman, “Figuration and Configuration: Mapping Imaginary Worlds in BD”, in C. Forsdick, L., Grove and L. McQuillan (eds.), The Francophone Bande dessinée (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) 115–136 [131–2]. 42  W. Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art (Tamarac, FA.: Poorhouse Pr., 1985) 124–7; McCloud (1993) 72, 97, 101, 104; Miller (2007) 97–101.

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The two forms of the presence of Xenophon’s story within the novel thus allude to various manners of understanding the Anabasis by readers: as real and depicting real historical action, or as virtual, a work of literature. Incidentally, the comic book rendition continues to the screen, with two cinematic versions, an original one (1979) and a director’s cut, built as an unfolding comic book (2007). It would seem that resounding the struggle of Xenophon and the soldiers to return to their home in the Greek speaking world from a barbaric environment, the story itself has been struggling to find the proper medium in which it would feel at home the most.

Home is where the Heart is

The comparison between Xenophon’s work and Yurick’s fictional novel highlights several themes which seem to have been suppressed in the ancient text and setting and brought to the fore by the modern work. The key notion of belonging (to a group of warriors, to a home) is both marked and problematized in the novel, with the atomization of the surrounding world (of New York City gangs), the multiplicity of perspectives and the modern feeling of rootlessness experienced by almost every character. The first point is the gender/age issue. Xenophon’s work describes a society of men and the hardships they encounter together.43 The Anabasis is in fact written by an older man, years after his experience as a youth or immature soldier.44 Another reading of Xenophon, however, would emphasize the fact 43  Cf. Xen. Anab. 3.1.36, 3.1.45, 3.2.11; Dillery (1995) 93–94. See  J. Lee, “Xenophon’s Anabasis and the Origins of Military Autobiography”, in Alex Vernon (ed.), Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Discourse (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2005) 41–60 [45]. C. Hindley, ‘Xenophon on Male Love’, CQ 49 (1999) 74–99. 44  For the date of the publication of the Anabasis after the late 380’s or early 360’s (post 371) BC, see M. MacLaren, “Xenophon and Themistogenes”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 15 (1934) 240–247; E. Delebecque, Essai sur la vie de Xenophon (Paris 1957) 199–206; H.R. Breitenbach, “Xenophon”, RE IX A 2 (1967) 1567–2052 [1641– 42]; G.L. Cawkwell, “Introduction”, in R. Warner (tr.), Xenophon. The Persian Expedition (London: Penguin, 1972), 16; Dillery (1995) 59, 94; N. Humble, Xenophon’s View of Sparta (PhD Diss., McMaster University, Hamilton, 1997) 26–31. It was perhaps initially published under the pseudonym Themistogenes of Syracuse (Xen. Hell. 3.1.2). Cf. Plutarch’s statement (De glor. Athen. 345e) that Xenophon assigned the account of Cyrus’ expedition to Themistogenes in order to gain credence. Most scholars accept this view. Yet W.K. Prentice, “Themistogenes of Syracuse an Error of a Copyist”, American Journal of Philology 68 (1947) 73–77 presents an interesting argument to the effect that this name is nothing but a copyist’s mistake.

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that the Greeks were all young, perhaps trying to be men. In fact, this understanding is mentioned by Yurick acting as reader of Xenophon apropos of the first review of the novel: The review in The Nation was favourable. The critic had one important reservation; he thought that the analogy to The Anabasis was perhaps a little too forced, even contemptuous of one of the Greek classics. After all, this was Greek civilization I was talking about. Well, at least the reviewer had not only heard about The Anabasis but had actually read it. What, I thought, were those mercenaries (kids, really) but the result of overpopulation whereas, in this country (this was before the escalation in Vietnam), there was no use for our indigenous poor young people. And after all, were the Greeks really so noble? (205) Correspondingly, in the novel the gang members are fourteen to sixteen years old (52, 134). Similarly, in an earlier portrayal by Yurick of his novel, it is presented as half the story of Ismael, “a New York gang-leader who wants to unite all the city-gangs to seize power”, and half “post-rumble odyssey of black-faced, teenaged ‘Greeks’ “returning to their cherished turf.45 They like to be considered men (18: “as men do, cool always and fight-ready”). There is emphasis on their manly appearance and its impact on women. The readers who are led by the citation of the epigraphs from Xenophon’s work to reflect on the Greek classical work might recall that women are almost completely absent there. In fact, men affect women only fleetingly in the Anabasis, when Cyrus tries to impress the Cilician queen Epyaxa through his Greek mercenaries (Anab. 1.2.14–18). To the girl of the Blazers, the Dominators look like men (85: “The invaders looked interesting, almost men”). This is the way they present themselves to her (97).46 The nurse sees them at this juncture: “Men. Boys. Young Men” (140). Women are also mentioned as adjunct members of the Family (13–14: “Mom ma … Aunts…. Daughters), partners of the male gang heroes (176: “Hector’s woman, Bimbo’s woman, Dewey’s woman and The Junior’s woman”, “daughters”), but they are absent from the entire adventure.47

45  John Leonard, “The Lip of the Apocalypse”, New York Magazine 1 (July, 1968), 69. 46  “We’re the men. I mean we, you know, all the best, and we’re the biggest men in the whole wide city”. 47  Yurick in Auster and Georgakas (1979) 24: “Women have a very specific part in gang life, but it is a very sexist role in which they are dominated. Their input is limited to influencing the individual they are attached to and so reflects the modern male sexist society.”

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The gang members engage in games to prove their manhood (113: “to see who was the most Man of the group”). They keep the gang insignia, according to Dewey, because it “made them men” (134). These do not necessarily show they are adults and mature, but quite the opposite. Yet, they are certainly at a crossroads between youthfulness and manhood. At critical points, they are presented as infantile (e.g., fearing cemeteries or ghosts, 48–51, 59, 125); the most impressive scene comes at the end, with Hinton falling asleep with his thumb in his mouth (181). As Graham (1976: 127) fittingly asks: “[h]ow can a novel that ends this way be thought of as revolutionary?” The answer may lie in the transition these teens (and Hinton) experience, in the psychic and mental journey they go through in the novel and not in the short distance of fifteen miles from the Bronx to Coney Island. The Dominators’ journey may thus be seen as something liminal, a rite of passage.48 This can be seen in the fact that the gang members engage in an almost ritualistic sacrificing of a bystander, resurrecting themselves, as it were, in the killing (101):49 This time Dewey caught it and plunged it down and caught the man in the heart and the man moaned and the moan was long and drawn-pout and excited them more because it lingered. Closely positioned together with this scene is that of the gang rape: Hinton was the last to go on her and by now her face was completely rigid and her eyes saw nothing at all and she was almost unconscious with the joy of it … It is Hinton who later wins the game of manhood by sticking his head out of the window of the going train closest to the passing wall outside (he was deemed the “Man With The Most Heart”, 113—the irony of the phrase, given the previous stabbing through the heart is not lost on the attentive readers). Almost allegorically, Hinton loses a bit of his hair and there was a gray mark, whitened by the tunnel wall outside. Hinton performs more tests of manhood on his own.50 48  Yurick (2003) 200: “… since I wanted to fold in the mythic and ritual, to make this journey a rite of passage, I thought in terms of similar (anthropological and literary) rite-ofpassage journeys.” 49  On the ritualistic aspect of this violence see Graham (1976) 125. 50  When he is in the subway tunnel, he relinquishes his fear as “a little boy’s fear, a terror of what wasn’t.… He had to be a hard man, like the others … These were never afraid.” (125).

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In an amusement arcade on 42nd street he challenges a sheriff machine to be “the fastest draw in the west” and finally wins (160–5).51 Accordingly, when he meets Dewey and Junior he now assumes the role of Father (166).52 He has become a man. Or has he? On the one hand, Hinton appears somewhat cautious (169: “He didn’t look back at them [the two couples coming from the prom/ dance] because then he’d have to recognize what their stare meant, and he’d have to challenge them, and that would lead to a little back and forth jive, and none of the Family were packed”). On the other, he drives the two other members to a futile attack on the members of the rival gang, all fast asleep.53 In both cases, however, it would appear that Hinton finds strength in the Family (159). The story occurs on the Fourth of July till the dawn of the fifth. This is not accidental, as the youths’ journey is meant to reflect on a struggle for independence. But independence from what exactly? It is not individual freedom. Presumably, it is liberation of the gang members from a certain ideal, the accomplishment of preserving their group as an alternative model to the surrounding society (more below).54 Readers who would draw a comparison here with the Ten Thousand might note the notion that the achievement of the Greeks acting as a group may have been similarly not a means to an end, but an end in itself.55 Indeed, some scholars portray the Greeks’ march as a story of an attainment of independence.56 The second point is the place of the individual within the group. It would seem that the focus of the novel is on the group (cf. 3–6, 26–7, 80–1 etc.). Awareness that the novel is a reception of Xenophon’s story of the army’s march may lead readers to be attentive of Yurick’s use of military allusions: he 51  P. 165: “Hinton very tired, straightened slowly in spite of his wounds, sucked in air, and felt new now—a man. He had faced up to and beaten the sheriff”. Cf. Graham (1976) 126. 52  “They sensed his new strength now and they were under him now, even though Dewey was Hinton’s elder brother.” 53  Junior notices the metamorphosis (170): “You’re losing your mind. You’re flipping. You’re becoming something else”. 54  The theme of freedom through the gang as the opposite of slavery recurs in the novel (13: “This Family freed them”; cf. 71, 159). 55  Cf. G. B. Nussbaum, The Ten Thousand: A Study in Social Organization and Action in Xenophon’s Anabasis (Leiden: Brill, 1967); cf. Dillery (1995) 63, 76–7, 85–87, 89, 91–95, 251. 56  See Xen. Anab. 3.2.13 ~ Aeschyl. Pers. 241–2. See J. Howland, “Xenophon’s Philosophic Odyssey: On the Anabasis and Plato’s Republic”, The American Political Science Review 94 (2000), 875–889 [881, 885]: “The emergence in the Anabasis of an orderly, unified, independent community, marked by high morale and a common sense of purpose” … “a story about crossing the threshold of maturity and independence …”

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speaks of a military formation (24), uses a military parlance (32, even within street jargon: “order to march away”: 172), sometimes with outright allusion to the Greek well known battle form of the phalanx (77: “the Family tried to phalanx up and spear through”). Yet, the novel generally presents a complex picture, which is not at all a story of an army. The focus on the individual members (especially Hinton) exposes their problematic qualities separately (e.g., cowardice or recklessness), suggesting that the novel’s title might be ironic.57 A description of the cohesiveness of the Family is given at the beginning: They moved out, a company of about twenty: Papa, Momma, Uncles and Aunts, Sons, Daughters, Cousins, walking their street … Pedestrians, the Other, quailed before the march of the Family and gave them the wide pass. Arnold’s children were hard and held their territory against one and all Other, coolie, fuzz, or gang … The family band, two cousins, with transistor radios blasting, came along for march music. (14) Earlier we are given a clue as to what happens when the gangs are not unified sufficiently against the police (45: “Some of them ran from side to side and back again, smashing into one another. Gangs began to fall apart”), while the Dominators “waited, held together” (46). The members’ obedience to the Papa is emphasized throughout (41, 47). An act of a pledge of allegiance to each other is detailed,58 as the fighting spirit is said to unite them into one (“gangperson-family, blood united”)—“till they could take on anyone”. The initial cohesive strength of the Dominators ensures that even if there are frictions (51, 105, 111, 136), and although the group is split up (166: “everyone had been separated …”) when the sense of unity seems to disperse,59 still the centrifugal forces cannot dissolve its existence. Again Hinton is made to emphasize this feature. When he is separated from the group, he wonders whether the rest deserted him (123: “They might have gotten away and just not seen him”) or whether they are caught, making him “really alone”. He discarded the thought of giving himself up to the police, as 57  Cf. Newhouse (2000) 45–46: “The Dominators, in fact, demonstrate none of the qualities essential to warriors.” 58  P. 90: While drinking alcohol (“all sucked from one another’s lips”), each of the members said “that this brother would serve his Family till he died”. 59  “They had lost the identity of oneness and were almost like three squares, coolies, three men who no longer had the special power. They all felt uncomfortable, detached, ­somehow—naked, like any three who happened to know one another and be dressed alike. They didn’t talk.” (137–8).

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that would put him “out of the gang, alone” and vulnerable. In the dark tunnel of the subway, he is afraid and alone,60 then feels chill and anxiety,61 fearing he would be lost forever, “alone in this blackness” (127). In the midst of this terrifying experience, Hinton removes the gang insignia (128: “he tore off his hat and threw it down and stamped on it, and the pin”),62 an act he had considered earlier (75, 112, cf. 119), thus actually removing himself from the Family. He immediately feels remorse (129: “because it so completely cut him off”), as though the Family could see what he did and he would be out of it; so he brushes the pin, places it back in his hat, and upholds his pledge to the group by writing its name on the wall. The happenings inside the tunnel are liminal and transitional in the sense mentioned above.63 Thus, from beginning64 to end,65 Hinton finds strength in the gang, his Family. The novel emphasizes racial differences within the gang. Through the eyes of the nurse again, the narrator clearly demarcates them: She opened her eyes and dimly saw the three standing in front of her … Only the one in the middle seemed to have any light on his face … She saw, over her glasses, that he had a beautiful face and blond, wavy hair curling down from his set-back hat … This time she noticed his two friends. They were darker-skinned. The short, squat one was a muddy light brown and had a little fuzzy mustache and looked Indian-faced. The other one was bulky-big dark, ugly, Negro-faced (140). Through these differences, Yurick seems to problematize the notion of the group’s unity, which subsists beyond traits of common race or culture.66 The 60  124; 125: “He felt alone in a darkness greater than any he had ever known before. It closed in more and more as he kept going.” 61  125: “The loneliness increased; he had never been as alone as this, never as cut off”. 62  This act is followed by his finger writing abuses on the Family on the crusted dirt. 63  See Graham (1976) 125 (“Hades-like tunnel”) who quotes S. Yurick, “The politics of the imagination: the problem of consciousness”, Tri-Quarterly 23/4 (1972) 501–551 [512] on the power of this totemistic identity of the group/gang: “Odysseus going down to Hades to seek advice from the shades of his dead companions.” 64  “[Hinton] was on the verge of terror and it was only the feel of his family around him that kept his mask tight.” (35). 65  The abovementioned scene in which Hinton shoots a mechanical sheriff in a fast-draw contest and wins allegorizes a victory over the individualism of the American Wild West. Cf. Graham (1976) 127. 66  Note that Yuick’s own sense of belonging was complicated. On occasion he would claim: “My feelings as a Jew were more important than my feelings as a communist”: Leonard (1968) 69.

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reader who recognizes that the novel is based on the Classical Greek text and with even a minimal knowledge of the ancient story would see some contrast in that the mercenaries of old are described as Greek, that is, they uphold unity through Hellenic shared identity.67 A profounder acquaintance with the Anabasis may bring forth in this comparison certain interesting instances, as in the unique case of Apollonides, the officer who spoke the Boeotian dialect, and was the only one who did not ask Xenophon to take the lead, and maintained that safety could be gained only by persuading the king and not by arms (Anab. 3.1.26). Others attempt to remove him from the group: Agasias claims him to be a Lydian (having both his ears bored), and to have “nothing to do either with Boeotia or with any part of Greece”; Xenophon proposes to treat him as a beast of burden (Xen. Anab. 3.1.26–32). The third point is the relationship of the group with the outer world. The gang is made to understand it is surrounded by the forces of the law of the country; here those are not Persian soldiers, as in the Anabasis, but the police (cf. 46). Other gangs are seen as the enemy (cf. 51: “everyone between here and home is ready to come down on you”), as Xenophon expectedly portrays the sentiment of his frightened soldiers.68 In the novel, they are simply called the “Other” (non-gang: e.g., 16, 39, 70, 78–9, 112, 125, 151, 163) or “Another Thing” (70, 73). During his experience in the tunnel, Hinton wishes that the men in overalls he sees in a glass-windowed room on the side of the uptown tracks (round a table, playing cards) would notice him, “and give him a glass of beer” (125). But he immediately realizes this could not be: “Not really, he thought, they were all white men, the Other”. Yurick appears to have toyed with the relationship of the gang to civilized culture. Xenophon and the mercenaries, to whom the novel’s readers are led to note and compare, were Greeks, and presumably ostensibly come across as bearers of higher culture, representatives of a classical civilization. Casting them as gang members has the additional advantage of stressing the aggressive and unpleasant side of the ancient soldiers, “barbarians from the inside”,

67  See Dillery (1995) 60, 62, 70–71, 76, 78, 83–84, 89, 94; cf. T. Rood, “Panhellenism and SelfPresentation: Xenophon’s Speeches” in Lane Fox (2004) 305–29. See P. Brulé, “Un nouveau monde ou le même monde?”, in P. Briant (ed.), Dans les pas des dix-mille: Peuple et pays du Proche-Orient vus par un grec [= Pallas 43] (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1995) 3–20. 68  See Anab. 2.3.13, 18, 2.5.9, 3.1.2, 3.1.10, 3.4.29, 3.5.14–18, 4.2.15, 4.7.19–2-, 5.1.6, 5.4.3, 5.6.36. Cf. Yurick in Auster and Georgakas (1979) 22: “I … wanted to show these kids as they really were. On the one hand, they could be absolutely horrifying and frightening. On the other, they were scared stiff because they were outside their own turf.”

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as it were, if the parallel with the gangs is forced.69 The ensuing skepticism any reader might feel is related to the manner Yurick noted in the 2003 Afterward (184), that “the Anabasis took place in what is now Iraq, where ‘Western Civilization’ is taking another defeat”, as if questioning the purpose and moral position of both the ancient and modern West. The form of presentation is another level in which the novel deviates from the image of the Greeks. Even with a very superficial knowledge of Xenophon’s story and its circulation in antiquity the novel’s readers may assume that the ancient work was accessible with respect to its language and cultural worldview, facts which helped make it a classic. The novel, however, seems to deliberately alienate readers, beginning in medias res70 and indulging in free indirect discourse, which verges on the virtual (e.g., 116–117). The group in the novel is meant to be taken entirely as an alternative bonding within society, challenging the biological ties of the family. It is a Family with a capital letter,71 and it is as ideological as the model the outside society supplies.72 Again, this feature points towards a comparison with Xenophon’s army as a unit for readers in the know.73 A further item in which Yurick’s novel may be compared with Xenophon’s work requires some knowledge of the content of the latter’s Anabasis. It is related to the failed ideal of the leader who convened the gang members/mercenaries. Xenophon dwells on Cyrus the Younger’s personality (Anab. 1.9), but not on the outcome the fulfillment of his promises (Xen. Anab. 1.3.20–1, 1.4.13, 1.7.7; Diod. 14.21.6; Plut. Art. 6.1–5) might have on the Greeks.74 One ideal is only briefly mentioned, namely, a call for 69  As Yurick (2003) 187 claims, “[t]his social phenomenon [fighting gangs] was viewed, on the one hand, as the invasion of the barbarians, only this time they came from the inside rather than from the outside”. 70  Graham (1976) 121. 71  Graham (1976) 122–5: “the novel is about the need to create a value structure inside the circle of lostness … [the value structure] represents the creation of a circle of warmth and brotherhood within the larger circle of the surrounding society … the gang coms into being as a surrogate family”. 72  Yurick in Auster and Georgakas (1979) 24: “When a society is falling apart and leaders betray, one response is to set up an authoritarian structure to keep yourself together”. 73  Cf. G.L. Cawkwell, “A Diet of Xenophon”, Didaskalos 2 (1967) 50–58 [55]: “A city on the move”; A. Dalby, “Greeks Abroad: Social Organisation and Food among the Ten Thousand”, JHS 112 (1992) 16–30 [17]. 74  Cf. Anab. 3.2.25. Interestingly, Yurick in Auster and Georgakas (1979) 22 addresses this effect himself: “… that’s how Athens solved its juvenile delinquency problem. It hired them out as mercenaries—those were 14 and 15 year-old kids wandering around Asia being led by their various generals. See also S. Yurick “How the Athenians Planned to Colonize the Mind of the West and Immortalize Themselves”, Social Text 23 (1989) 29–58.

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Greek unity against Persia, and for collective action against the weak Empire.75 This vision is put in Cyrus’ mouth (Anab. 1.7.3): I have brought you hither to fight for me … because I believe that you are braver and stronger than many barbarians, for this reason I took you. This might seem to some knowledgeable readers of Yurick’s novel, as foreshadowing the vision of Ismael, who emphasizes the strength of the gangs over that of the police: He told them about the big dream he had. One gang could, in time, run the city. Did they know what a hundred thousand was? There were only about twenty thousand fuzz. Why should the biggest power force, one hundred thousand, in the city be put down by the Enemy, the Other? (38–9) While the message is only hinted by Xenophon, Yurick allots Ismael’s ideals a certain place at the beginning of the novel. It is a revolutionary model, geared towards a form of a collective power among the gangs, which is based on peace among them.76 Yet, the assembly almost inevitably breaks up in chaos, and Ismael fails to fulfill his vision.77 Ismael’s ideal “homeland” is thus beyond reach. Besides that of Ismael, there are three other types of “home” in the novel. The first is another imaginary ideal one, presumably propagated by the surrounding society. Hinton entertains the thought of reaching that “home”, but realizes he would never do it: It would be nice to have a girl. It would be nice to cut out from the Family, to retire from bopping. Hinton felt wearier. Maybe he could get a girl, not exactly like this one—blonde, yet not really blonde; white, but not white—light-colored, long-haired. She would be innocent, sweet, from 75  See Dillery (1995) 61. Cf. Xen. Hell. 3.4.2; Isoc. 4.148, 5.90; Polyb. 3.6.9–12; Plut. Art. 20; Arr. Anab. 2.7.8–9. 76  Graham (1976) 123, 127 sees Ismael’s attempt to organize the gangs as akin to Lenin’s strategy—“a message of hope delivered to the inarticulate and oppressed masses.” 77  Cf. B. Morton’s portrayal in “Modern Superstitions: a review of Sol Yurick’s Behold Metatron, The Recording Angel”, The Nation (February 1986) 122: “Yurick has always been fascinated by the myths that mask relations of power and prevent a dominated population from understanding its condition. His novels are filled with deluded true believers, passionate adherents of ideologies that leave them incapable of seeing what’s in front of their eyes.”

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some other part of town, dressed clean, beautiful, slender—go steady— marry—a family. He would have a job, a chance. Having someone like her to marry would give him ambition. They would have a home and a dog … And he knew now that he’d never have this dream; not that way. (168–9) Another is the “home” the gang desires to get back to, a desire portrayed as the central motive that animates the plot in the novel.78 Yet, when Hinton returns home, the real home is portrayed as such: He came to The Prison. It was a four-story brick apartment house. They lived on the top floor. Their apartment had been found for them, as always, by the Department of Welfare, and it was the twentieth place he had lived since he had been born, or five more places than he was old (177). Even the sea cannot be seen from his window, when Hinton’s eyes stare out over the trees and through the laundry lines toward “where the sea would be if it wasn’t blocked off by a big hotel” (181). Like Ismael’s, Hinton’s home cannot be reached. The readers who are led to compare the novel with the Anabasis may ask whether Xenophon’s soldiers fared better. The Anabasis ends with the Spartan general Thibron, the new hiring leader taking over the army, uniting it with the rest of his Greek forces and proceeding to wage war upon Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus in Asia (Anab. 7.8.24). Although the final scene of the novel is claustrophobic and not open-ended as the Anabasis, both share the same picture to the effect that what was thought of as the real home is in fact remote and inaccessible.

Conclusion: There’s No Place like Home

The relationship between Yurick’s fiction and that of Xenophon is beautifully displayed in the opening scene of the novel:

78  “Someone has got to be the Father till we get back home. You listen to me. We’ll move out before twelve … They waited. They listened. They looked out for the cops, the other gangs, the watchman, while Hector made the plan for getting all the way home.” (6).

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Six warriors crouched in the shadow of a tomb … Embracing cherubs smiled down on them from the eaves of the tomb, fat-faced and benevolent … the smiling stone cherubs changed into something malevolent in the spangled light … (3–4) Dewey wondered if it could be true. If—things—did come up from the graves … the little fat stone cherubs on the tomb press their cheeks together, and their smile becomes more and more evil as the hour evolves to midnight. (50–51). Most of the gang members (except for Hinton) are terrified whether dead things might regain life, and imagine that the stone statues of cherubs change their expression, with the assumption of animate (malevolent) intent. This scene can be appreciated as an allegory of the way the text of Xenophon, although dead, can be brought again to life or to another mode of existence through the new work of art.79 It also symbolizes the relationship of the living work to the dead one: Yurick’s Warriors sit at the shadow of Xenophon’s tomb, as explicitly made clear by the citation of the epigraphs from the Anabasis at the outset. If it is true that ghosts do rise from their graves after midnight (6), then they might appear eager to return home, to their former condition as living, just like the Warriors, and like Xenophon himself and his soldiers. It would thus seem that the adaptation of Xenophon’s Anabasis by Sol Yurick is not an artificial reading of the ancient text, translated now into a different milieu of New York street gangs. Rather, the modern novel presents a real and rich portrayal of aspects and contexts, which Xenophon appears to simplify or even downplay, and discovered by readers who enjoy different levels of acquaintance with Xenophon’s work. It would appear that all these aspects revolve round the theme of belonging: being part of a gender, an agegroup or a race, and finding a place within the surrounding society. Another facet of this question is whether Xenophon’s warriors properly belong to the so-called elite “high culture” or art/literature (as a work experienced by generations of readers of Greek) or to a so called “low”, material, popular culture (as experienced by the soldiers themselves). It would appear that these latent components in Xenophon’s Anabasis and queries enfolding his work were deconstructed by Yurick only to be reassembled in a new, insightfully thoughtprovoking manner, which casts the original depiction in a complex and ironic 79  Incidentally, Yurick (2003) 199 mentions that Henry Melville, the author of Moby Dick (1851), is buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery. Yurick’s Ismael is a resurrection, as it were, of Melville’s Ishmael (see Yurick, 2003: 198), the only surviving crewmember of the Pequod, and the narrator of the story.

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way. The Warriors even succeeds in problematizing the notion of “home” itself, split now into a bourgeois ideal, a revolutionary ideal, an alternative model (“Family”) and a grim real one (“family”). This is related to what the study of classical reception should achieve: answering not only the way the past is received in a later period, but also how the modern and recent writers are able to enhance or discover facets which were not considered or were not so pronounced in antiquity. The movie based on Yurick’s novel succeeds in bringing this point back home.80 Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”, in James Bernstein (ed.), The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1991) 29–60. Adorno, Theodor W., “Theory of Pseudo-Culture”, Telos 95 (1993[1959]) 15–39. Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer, “The Schema of Mass Culture”, in James M. Bernstein (ed.) The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991) 61–97. Almagor, Eran, “Reinventing the Barbarian: Reshaping Classical Ethnographic Perceptions in Goscinny’s and Uderzo’s Astérix”, in George Kovacs and Toph Marshall (eds.), Son of Classics and Comics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) 113–129. Almagor, Eran, “Can You Dig It? Heroes and Villains from Xenophon’s Anabasis to The Warriors (1979)” in Eran Almagor and Lisa Maurice (eds.) Ancient Virtues and Vices in Modern Popular Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2017) 103–39. Anson, Edward, “The General’s Pre-Battle Exhortation in Graeco-Roman Warfare”, Greece & Rome, 57 (2010) 304–318. Auster, Al and Dan Georgakas, “The Warriors: An Interview with Sol Yurick”, Cinéaste 9 (1979) 22–24. Baudrillard, Jean, America, (trans. Chris Turner, New York: Verso, 1988). Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in idem, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992) 211–44. Betts, Raymond F., A History of Popular Culture: More of Everything, Faster and Brighter (New York: Routledge, 2004). Bonner, Robert J., “The name ‘Ten Thousand’ ”, CPh 5 (1910) 97–9. Bosworth, Albert Brian, From Arrian to Alexander (Oxford: OUP, 1988) 135–156. Bowie, Ewen Lyall, “Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic”, Past & Present 46 (1970) 3–41. 80  See Almagor (2017).

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Breitenbach, Hans Rudolf, “Xenophon”, RE IX A 2 (1967) 1567–2052. Bridgeman, Teresa, “Figuration and Configuration: Mapping Imaginary Worlds in BD”, in Charles Forsdick, Laurence Grove, and Libbie McQuillan (eds.), The Francophone Bande dessinée (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) 115–136. Briggs, Ward, “Book Review: Arthur J. Pomeroy, Then It Was Destroyed by the Volcano: The Ancient World in Film and Television (London: Duckworth. 2008)”, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 17 (2010) 156- 161. Brown Ferrario, Sarah, Historical Agency and the ‘Great Man’ in Classical Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Brulé, Pierre, “Un nouveau monde ou le même monde?”, in Pierre Briant (ed.), Dans les pas des dix-mille: Peuple et pays du Proche-Orient vus par un grec [= Pallas 43] (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1995) 3–20. Cawkwell, George Law, “A Diet of Xenophon”, Didaskalos 2 (1967) 50–58. Cawkwell, George Law, “Introduction”, in R. Warner (tr.), Xenophon. The Persian Expedition (London: Penguin, 1972). Dalby, Andrew, “Greeks Abroad: Social Organisation and Food among the Ten Thousand”, JHS 112 (1992) 16–30. Delebecque, Edouard, Essai sur la vie de Xenophon (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1957). Dillery, John, Xenophon and the History of His Times (London: Routledge, 1995). Eisner, Will, Comics and Sequential Art (Tamarac, FA: Poorhouse Press, 1985). Fromartz, Samuel , “Remembering Sol Yurick”, The Nation (16 January 2013). Gera, Deborah Levine, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia: Style, Genre, and Literary Technique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Graham, Don B., “Interview with Sol Yurick”, Philadelphia (February 1973). Graham, Don B., “Naturalism and the Revolutionary Imperative: Sol Yurick’s The Warriors”, Critique 18 (1976) 119–28. Graham, Don B., “Naturalism in American Fiction: A Status Report”, Studies in American Fiction 10 (Spring 1982) 1–16. Griffith, Guy Thompson, The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934). Hall, Edith, “Putting the Class into Classical Reception” in Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (eds.), A Companion to Classical Receptions (Malden, MA: Blackwell-Wiley, 2008) 386–397. Hansen, M.H., “The Battle Exhortation in Ancient Historiography: Fact or Fiction?” Historia 42 (1993) 161–180. Hardwick, Lorna and Christopher Stray, “Introduction” in Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (eds.), A Companion to Classical Receptions (Malden, MA: Blackwell-Wiley, 2008) 1–12. Hindley, Clifford, “Xenophon on Male Love”, CQ 49 (1999) 74–99. Homberger, Eric, “Sol Yurick obituary”, The Guardian (7 January 2013).

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Howland, Jacob, “Xenophon’s Philosophic Odyssey: On the Anabasis and Plato’s Republic”, The American Political Science Review 94 (2000) 875–889. Humble, Noreen M., Xenophon’s View of Sparta (PhD Diss., McMaster University, Hamilton, 1997). Lee, John W. I., “Xenophon’s Anabasis and the Origins of Military Autobiography”, in Alex Vernon (ed.), Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Discourse (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2005) 41–60. Leonard, John, “The Lip of the Apocalypse”, New York Magazine 1 (July 1968) 69. Ma, John, “You Can’t Go Home Again: Displacement and Identity in Xenophon’s Anabasis”, in Robin Lane Fox (ed.), The Long March. Xenophon and the Ten Thousand (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004) 330–45. MacLaren, Malcolm Jr., “Xenophon and Themistogenes”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 15 (1934) 240–247. Marasso, Anna, Ashes of Gold: loss of innocence and rites of passage: selected tales from 1950’s Hollywood rebels to 1960’s youth gangs (MA Thesis, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, 2013/4). Marinovic, Ludmila Petrovna, Le Mercenariat grec au IVe siècle avant notre ère et la crise de la Polis (Trans. J. and Y. Garlan) (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1988). Masqueray, Paul, “Origine de l’expression les ‘Dix-Mille’ ”, CRAI 1 (1928) 111–115. McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993). McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding the Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964). Miller, Ann, Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip (Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 2007) 139–41. Morton, Brian, “Modern Superstitions: a review of Sol Yurick’s Behold Metatron, The Recording Angel”, The Nation (February 1986) 122. Münscher, Karl, Xenophon in der griechisch-römischen Literatur, Philologus Suppl. 13/2 (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1920). Nayyar, Deepak, Modern Mass Communication (Concepts and Processes), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Newhouse, Thomas, The Beat Generation and the Popular Novel in the United States, 1945–1970 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Publishers, 2000). Nussbaum, Gerald Bruno, The Ten Thousand: A Study in Social Organization and Action in Xenophon’s Anabasis (Leiden: Brill, 1967). Parke, Herbert William, Greek Mercenary Soldiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). Pérez Martín, Inmaculada, “The Reception of Xenophon in Byzantium: The Macedonian Period”, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013) 812–855. Pernot, Laurent, “La reception antique de Xénophon: quel modèle pour quels orateurs?”, in Pierre Pontier (ed.), Xénophon et la rhétorique, (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2014), 281–294.

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Pomeroy, Arthur J., Then It Was Destroyed by the Volcano: The Ancient World in Film and Television (London: Duckworth, 2008). Prentice, William Kelly, “Themistogenes of Syracuse an Error of a Copyist”, American Journal of Philology 68 (1947) 73–77. Rood, Tim, The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination (London:  Duckworth, 2004a) Rood, Tim, “Panhellenism and Self-Presentation: Xenophon’s Speeches” in Robin Lane Fox (ed.), The Long March. Xenophon and the Ten Thousand (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004b) 305–29. Rood, Tim, American Anabasis: Xenophon and the Idea of America from the Mexican War to Iraq (London:  Duckworth, 2010). Rood, Tim, “A Delightful Retreat: Xenophon and the Picturesque” in Fiona Hobden and Christopher. J. Tuplin (eds.), Xenophon: Ethical Principles and Historical Enquiry (Leiden: Brill, 2012) 89–112. Roy, James, “The Mercenaries of Cyrus”, Historia, 16 (1967) 287–323. Sheridan, Richard, “In Memoriam”, Brooklyn College Magazine 2 (Spring 2013) 39. Solymar, Laszlo, Getting the Message: A History of Communications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Stylianou, Panico J., “One Anabasis or Two?”, in Robin Lane Fox (ed.), The Long March. Xenophon and the Ten Thousand (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004) 68–96. Yardley, William, “Sol Yurick, 87, Author of ‘The Warriors’ Gang Novel”, The New York Times (9 January 2013). Yurick, Sol, “The politics of the imagination: the problem of consciousness”, TriQuarterly 23/4 (1972) 501–551. Yurick, Sol, “How the Athenians Planned to Colonize the Mind of the West and Immortalize Themselves”, Social Text 23 (1989) 29–58. Yurick, Sol, “Afterward: How I Came to Write The Warriors and What Happened After” in Sol Yurick, The Warriors (New York: Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 183–192. Waites, Bernard, Tony Bennett and Graham Martin (eds.), “Introduction” in Bernard Waites, Tony Bennett, and Graham Martin (eds.), Popular Culture: Past and Present (London: Croom Helm / Open University Press, 1985) 15–19. Ward, Ken, Mass Communication and the Modern World (London: Macmillan Press, 1989). Witkin, Robert W., Adorno on Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003).

CHAPTER 5

The Eagle and the Mockingjay: Reality Television as Roman Gladiator Culture Dor Yaccobi The United States of America has drawn inspiration from the Roman Empire since its founding. It has clothed itself in ancient emblems of power such as the Senate and the Capitol, even adopting the Roman eagle as one of its chief national symbols. The contemporary expression of this unique bond is reality television programming, which can be viewed as modern gladiator culture. This transcendental connection between both cultures has recently been embodied in The Hunger Games trilogy written by American author Suzanne Collins. Since their publication in 2008, the books have achieved worldwide successes and their cinematic adaptations have all been blockbusters. The Hunger Games takes place in a not-too-distant future, where the country Panem stands on the ruins of what was once the United States, and whose culture revolves around cruel gladiator matches broadcast throughout the nation in a format identical to reality television. The Hunger Games trilogy criticizes contemporary pageant culture by creating an indelible link between reality television—the epitome of modern spectacle—and the brutal gladiator games of ancient Rome. The series contains a warning for a bleak future by constructing the Capitol as representative of everything we should fear: a stratified society indifferent to social inequality; decadent and immersed in the instant gratification of bread and circuses; a society so out of touch with its own humanity that even the spilled blood of children fails to be exciting without additional dramatic manipulation. 1.1

The Society of Spectacle in Modern Thought

The phrase “society of spectacle” was coined by the revolutionary French philosopher Ernest Guy Debord in his well-known 1967 book of the same name.1 Less than a year following its publication, its Marxist spirit found expression 1  Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle, Trans. Ken Krabb (London: Rebel, 2005) [1967].

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not only in the political events of May 1968,2 but also greatly influenced the new left throughout Europe. To this day, Debord’s ideas are part of the foundation of ideological movements against globalization and consumerism. Among many other things in this seminal text, Debord describes the way in which hegemony forces its will upon the masses via spectacle, or enacting pageantry: Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the present mode of production. It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world, it is the heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations—news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment—the spectacle is the model of the prevailing way of life. emphasis in original3

To paraphrase Debord, it can be said that in the modern or ancient world, in Rome or the United States, spectacle is the epitome of “the model.” Spectacle allows the reigning authority to preserve the current model from which it draws its power and status. Spectacle creates a sense of religious ecstasy that is associated with certain content: news, propaganda, sports, and entertainment. The content becomes insignificant, leaving nothing but endlessly replicated images. One of the definitive examples of this “society of spectacle” is American reality television4 which acts as modern incarnation of gladiator games, and its heroes are American gladiators. Much like their Roman counterpart, the American gladiator arena is public, the so-called fighter places him or herself at its center to receive the few minutes of fame in which they battle for life and death of their public persona, disappearing at the end to make room for another combatant. The American gladiator is an individual who has realized him or herself through the public demise of their character, some who have been preparing for this their entire lives—race car drivers, athletes, fashion models, and of course television and movie stars. Essentially, the roots of the society of spectacle can already be found in Ancient Rome.5 Events such as the Olympics, 2  The “Students’ Revolution” which included strikes, demonstrations, and riots all over France. 3  Debord (1967) Thesis no. 6. 4  Gabriel Weimann, Jonathan Cohen and Inbal Bar-Sinai, “Fallen Star: Examining the Rela­ tionship between Humiliation on Reality Programs and the Viewers’ Enjoyment”, Misgarot Media: a Journal of Israeli Media 3 (March 2009) 1–26.. 5  Most gladiators were prisoners of war, slaves, or condemned criminals. However, some were also from good families that had fallen into debt. Very rarely, there were even free citizens who had chosen this doubtful occupation as a means of attaining glory. The profession

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haute couture shows, news broadcasts, and reality television all provide a feeling of togetherness and imitate ritual practices enacted in gladiator matches. Jean Baudrillard highlighted the connection between pageantry and ritual practices, particularly in the case of American cinema and its treatment of movie stars: This is why the cult of the stars is not a secondary phenomenon, but the supreme form of cinema, its mythical transfiguration, the last great myth of our modernity. Precisely because the idol is merely—pure, contagious image, a violently realized ideal. […] The screen idols are immanent in the unfolding of life as a series of images. They are a system of luxury prefabrication, brilliant syntheses of the stereotype of life and love. They embody one single passion only: the passion for images, and the immanence of desire in the image. They are not something to dream about; they are the dream. emphasis in original6

Baudrillard in effect viewed American cinema as an entity that created reality rather than fiction, and American culture was therefore a direct product of this manufactured reality. He related to the worship of movie stars as a uniquely American phenomenon which in turn spawned other similar phenomena: the cult of beauty, the worship of money and wealth, and the idealization of youth, the obsessive fixation on the body and its needs, and unnatural behavior that creates the Orwellian sensation of the camera’s constant presence. Thus, in light of Debord and Baudrillard’s observations, it is evident that gladiator culture has not disappeared with the ancient world, rather it has been given new incarnations. The Hunger Games are set in a dystopian vision of the future United States channeled through Roman culture. They have brutal gladiator games following was considered dishonorable (infamia), much like prostitution or “pimping” see Luciana Jacobelly, Gladiators in Pompeii (Los Angeles, California: Getty Publication, 2003) 19–20). Most gladiators had little chance of surviving the arena, becoming citizens or marrying a daughter of Rome, and yet they enjoyed a rich diet, trained in organized establishments, and possessed enviable physical attributes. Some were even rewarded with private quarters, a limitless supply of female company, and the right to come and go as they pleased. If they satisfied their superiors, they might even be allowed to marry. Most importantly, gladiators who achieved star status received fortunes of money and expensive gifts from adoring fans, and sometimes even acquired their freedom (Jacobelly (2003) 22–23). For more on ancient gladiator culture see Jacobelly (2003) 5–28. 6  Jean Baudrillard, America (London and New York: Verso, 1989) 56.

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the Roman formula with the added spin of being broadcast in prime time throughout Panem in the typical American reality television format. I suggest that the narrative’s power springs from the connection it creates between gladiator games and reality programs, presenting them both as expressions of spectacle culture. Collins’ strategy is anchored in placing the reader in supposedly conflicting positions: enjoying the spectacle of “watching” the games while nevertheless feeling discomfort from that same enjoyment. Thus Collins forces her young readers to confront a significant ethical quandary: if we are charmed so much by spectacle in spite of its evil and cruelty, what separates us from the Roman mob cheering for blood to be spilled? What in essence makes us more civilized than the Romans? The Hunger Games are therefore a sophisticated text which invites the reader to sit in the balcony, as it were, to marvel at the pageantry, but also to criticize it. 1.2

Panem as the New Rome

Though the setting of The Hunger Games is ostensibly a post-apocalyptic future, it reinforces the connection between the US and ancient Rome. To being with, the name Panem has two possible interpretations: one, as being a reference to the Latin expression “Panem et circenses”, meaning bread and circuses, the two chief methods employed by the Caesars to manipulate the people of Rome; two, as a play on “Pan-Am”, thereby referencing a pan-American vision of the future. Built upon the ruins of North America, the society of Panem is highly stratified, its wealth gap intolerable. The multitudes suffer from starvation and hard labor to supply the needs of the Capitol citizens. These residents are decadent elitists, who dress in grotesque opulence, spending their days at banquets and galas. One of the customs at such events is gorging on delicacies and then drinking a liquid to induce regurgitation, thus allowing them to continue stuffing themselves. In Catching Fire (Book II in the trilogy), the characters Octavia and Flavius, Capitol natives, suggest this practice to Katniss and Peeta, when they attend a presidential gala in their honor. As non-natives who have known starvation and hardship their entire lives, they are duly shocked and disgusted by this “elite” practice:7

7  Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (New York: Scholastic press, 2013) 79.

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“Why aren’t you eating?” asks Octavia “I have been, but I can’t hold another bite”, I say. They all laugh as if that’s the silliest thing they’ve ever heard. “No one lets that stop them!” says Flavius. They lead us over to a table that holds tiny stemmed wineglasses filled with clear liquid. “Drink this!” Peeta picks one up to take a sip and they lose it. “Not here!” shrieks Octavia. “You have to do it there”, says Venia, pointing to the door that lead to the toilet. “Or you’ll get it all over the floor!” Peeta looks at the glass again and puts it together. “You mean this will make me puke?” My prep team laughs hysterically. “Of course, so you can keep eating”, says Octavia. “I’ve been there twice already. Everyone does it, or else how would you have any fun at a feast?” This custom is similar to the well-known practice of Roman nobility employing a feather to “tickle the throat”,8 as well as playing on the famous, albeit fallacious, myth of the ‘vomitorium’. The state itself is divided into thirteen districts—most likely an allusion to the original thirteen colonies—and is ruled by a cruel bloodthirsty tyrant named Snow. The first and second districts are closest to the Capitol, thus its citizens have a higher status. They live in comparative comfort given that they manufacture luxury items such as jewelry as well as weapons. Citizens of the farther districts, however, who make a living through fishing, agriculture and mining, suffer abject poverty. Every year the Capitol holds a ceremony officially called “The Hunger Games”, during which a boy and girl between the ages of twelve to eighteen from each district are chosen by lottery to compete in a fight to the death. These “tributes” as they are called, battle not only for their own lives but for the ostensible glory of representing their district in the nationally televised event. Moreover, the last tribute standing wins a lifetime’s supply of food and upgraded living conditions for their family as well as a year’s extra supply of food for their entire district. Much like some of the gladiators in ancient Rome, there are even “career tributes”, boys and girls from the wealthier families of the first two

8  Sophie Mills, “Classical Elements and Mythological Archetypes in The Hunger Games”, New Voices in Classical Reception Studies, University of North Carolina, Asheville 10 (2015) 59. With thanks to Lisa Maurice for this reference.

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districts who train from infancy for the honor of competing in the games.9 These games are the foundation for the entire culture—its broadcast format that of a typical reality program,10 complete with commentators, public voting, sponsors, and fabricated personas for each tribute to employ in the hopes of becoming a favored contestant. Thus the games represent a particularly cruel facet of the culture of spectacle, a reality in which children being murdered and committing murder is portrayed as elite entertainment. The Hunger Games makes further allusions to the ancient Roman gladiator tradition, such as using female warriors and the active intervention of gamemakers intensifying the danger by creating wildfires, flash-floods, and even unleashing genetically engineered animal predators. The games encourage active audience participation and sponsors providing gifts throughout the games for popular competitors. As the games go on, it becomes more and more expensive for sponsors to provide gifts to tributes, thus the games are not only an ideological demonstration but a ruthless commercial endeavor which benefits the state.11 Dierdre Byrne explores Collins’ choice of the word “tribute” for her young gladiators, pointing out that the Latin word signifies a gesture of appreciation to the ruler in order to please him and gain his protection. In effect, these children are a kind of tax owed to the ruling establishment.12 The games are a cruel tradition in honor of the collective trauma immortalized in the document named “The Treason Treaty.” Seventy-five years before the events of the story take place the districts rebelled against the Capitol in what became a bloody civil war. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the authority and henceforth commemorated in the annual games as a reminder of what could happen if another rebellion is attempted. In order to further clue her young readers in on the world they are entering, Collins gives many of her key characters well-known Roman names, especially characters who are Capitol residents or stalwart followers of the authority’s policies. Thus the President’s first name is Coriolanus; Seneca Crane is the head game-maker in the first book;13 Plutarch Heavensbee, the game-maker 9   Jacobelly (2003) 20; See also; Kyle, Donald G., Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 1998) 79–80. 10  Alice Hall, “Viewers’ Perceptions of Reality Programs”, Communication Quarterly 54.2 (2006) 191–211. 11  Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 1998) 84–85. 12  Dierdre Byrne, “Dressed for the Part: An Analysis of Clothing in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games”, Library Journal of Literary Study (2015) 45. 13  Like his Roman counterpart, Seneca is forced to commit suicide at the decree of his ruler.

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in book II; Claudius Templesmith, the games’ announcer and commentator; Caesar Flickerman, the central showman for the events surrounding the games; Cato, the Career-Tribute; Romulus Thread, the sadistic guard captain in charge of policing Katniss’s home district in Catching Fire; and even minor figures such as the abovementioned Octavius and Flavia. Characters from the farther districts have distinctly non-Roman names such as Katniss, Peeta, Haymitch, Gale, Rue, and so on.14 These Roman names solidify the unique ontology fusing Roman gladiator culture with American reality television, amplifying America’s Roman heritage and the sense of continuity between the ancient past and the post-apocalyptic future. 1.3

Katniss Everdeen and the Gladiator Tradition

The series’ heroine, seventeen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, lives in District 12, the coalmining district. After her father is killed in a mining accident, her mother becomes virtually catatonic with depression. This leaves Katniss the sole provider for herself and younger sister Prim, a feat she accomplishes through illegal hunting in the nearby woods. The narrative’s motivating incident occurs when Katniss volunteers as tribute to the games in place of her sister Prim, a delicate and sensitive twelve-year-old, who is randomly selected at the “reaping ceremony.” Byrne claims that Collins creates a clever twist by casting a young woman in the role usually occupied by a male hero, a choice which may inspire young female readers and could also explain the series’ immense popularity.15 It is crucial to remember that in the world depicted in The Hunger Games, young female gladiators are not an unusual phenomenon, much as in the case of Roman gladiators.16 Katniss is joined by other female gladiators throughout the series—Rue, Fox-face, Joanna, Mags, the career-tribute Glimmer, and so on. Byrne therefore argues that Katniss’ heroic character is the product of the world she inhabits, which despite other blatant flaws like social injustice and a totalitarian regime founded on a rigid class system has a surprisingly advanced 14  However, it is also worth noting that as the books progress and the narrative’s political commentary becomes more complex, even characters with Roman names such as Plutarch turn out to be friend rather than foe. Moreover, in Mockingjay, Katniss is aided in the battlefield by twins named Castor and Pollux, a sly allusion to the Roman demigods who were the patrons of athletes and soldiers. 15  Byrne (2015) 44. 16  Jacobelly (2003) 17–18.

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concept of gender equality, making Katniss a suitable feminist role-model. However, I would like to suggest that The Hunger Games is a pseudo-feminist narrative which only appears to promote feminist agendas given the way in which the narrative is eventually concluded: at the end of the third installment, Mockingjay, Katniss puts down her signature weapon—the bow and arrow—to marry her fellow combatant Peeta and raise a family. The huntress and fighter thus fulfill woman’s biological destiny despite Katniss’ early declarations of never wanting to marry or have children, trading in her gladiator’s independence for the typical bourgeois American dream.17 Katniss leaves for the games with the certain knowledge of her own death, yet in light of her skills in hunting and fishing, and an endearing directness in attitude, she manages not only to survive the games but to become their biggest star. It appears that Collins may have drawn her inspiration for Katniss from famous gladiator epics such as Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and Gladiator (2000). From Spartacus, the series borrows the spirit of rebellion and the doubt cast upon a society’s ability to sustain itself in the face of intolerable gaps between the classes. From Gladiator it borrows the debate over the significance and oppressiveness of spectacle culture and the way it shapes society. From Ben-Hur, aside from the cinematic convention of the underdog rising to greatness, it also borrows the connection between spectacle and oppression.18 Another clear influence of the gladiator films can be found in the impressive entrance ceremony to the games which reads like a Roman triumphal procession. Cinna, Katniss’s stylist, designs a unique dress in order to make her appearance unforgettable to the public. The costume, which is comprised of an androgynous black body suit and cape which through technological trickery appears to be on fire, creating a striking image of Katniss and earning her the nickname “Girl on Fire” that stays with her throughout her public appearances, and catches the eye of President Snow himself. This echoes one of the memorable sequences in Ben-Hur where a seemingly endless parade of chariots and soldiers march proudly toward Caesar. Both scenes emphasize spectacle and the relation between emperor and pageant culture.

17  Riley McGuire also highlights Katnis’s early declaration of refusing to marry and have children as indicative of a possibility for freer sexuality, one that is ostensibly unburdened by reproduction and parenthood. Riley McGuire, “Queer Children, Queer Futures: Navigating Life and Death in the Hunger Games”, Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 48.2 (2015) 63–76. 18  The narrative’s dialogue with these beloved classics may also help to explain the series’ popularity among adults.

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It also appears that Collins creates a connection between Katniss and Judah Ben-Hur as forced arena performers who will eventually go on to lead rebellions against the reigning authority. Like Ben-Hur and the province he represents, Katniss also comes from a far-off dangerous territory. Katniss is marked from the first as someone who has nothing to lose; she declares she will never marry or have children and volunteers to die in place of her sister. Even though she is not aware of it at the precise moment, Katniss gradually comes to learn that her very entrance into the arena is an act of provocation and a threatening message to President Snow. Her appearance, in terms of costume and place of origin signal to the Capitol that she comes from a place where they play with fire and that everyone can catch fire along with her. Much later on in the series, Katniss stars in propaganda where, on the background of District 8 in flames, she informs the President and his followers in the Capitol, “If we burn, you burn with us.”19 Much like her cinematic forefathers, Katniss is characterized as a young individualist, impulsive and rebellious. During her training period before the games, she is involved in numerous scandals—most notably shooting an arrow toward the game-makers who are so busy gorging themselves that they ignore her completely, though they are supposed to give her an evaluating grade which will help determine her success at the start of the games. The arrow misses Seneca Crane’s head by only a few inches. This rebellious act, though committed out of personal indignation, is interpreted as collective political scheming and singles out Katniss as a professional troublemaker dangerous to the authority. This scene is in evident dialogue with a similar one in Spartacus wherein the villainous General Crassus visits the gladiator training school and special matches are held in his honor. In one of these matches, Spartacus is forced to fight another gladiator named Draba. After tense sparring, Draba is about to kill Spartacus but after a moment’s hesitation, hurls his trident at Crassus instead, nearly killing him.20 In light of these and other provocations, a tactless manner and other contrary expressions, Katniss at first seems be a candidate with low chances of survival. Her mentor Haymitch, himself a former victor of the games, does everything to make Katniss seem desirable and beloved, including a fabricated romance between herself and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark. The dynamic between the two echoes a scene from Gladiator where Proximo, 19  Collins (2010) 105. 20  In reference to this scene, Sophie Mills also identifies an intertextual relationship with the myth of Odysseus and the legend of William Tell, a further indication of the text’s multiple layers of meaning.

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who becomes Maximus’s mentor, implores him to make the crowd love him in order to get what he wants, “Win the crowd, and win your freedom.” Maximus follows his advice and gains great power from the love of the multitudes. Similarly, Haymitch keeps reminding Katniss that audience approval is everything, whether she likes it or not, and it is the only way she will truly survive the games. Indeed, much like her cinematic predecessors, Katniss slowly learns how to win the crowd’s approval, and that in spectacle culture where appearances are everything, being popular and admired are no less useful than knowing how to shoot a bow and arrow. Through her popularity she gains several lifesaving gifts from sponsors such as water, soup, and cream for treating burns. This receiving of expensive gifts from adoring fans and patrons is, of course, originally a Roman tradition which helped cement the status of gladiators.21 It plays on the contemporary custom of reality television where audiences vote on contestants’ performances, even determining their future on the program and other commercial entities provide various prizes in cash or luxury items. 1.4

The Eagle and the Mockingjay

Katniss gradually develops her skills and determination to be adored by the masses, reaching a peak in Book III where she agrees to become the Mockingjay, the symbol of the rebellion against the Capitol. Jonathan Hollister claims that the fact that Katniss is willing to take on the figure of the mockingjay is a testament to her acquiring media savvy and her understanding of the importance of image in her reality.22 Katniss comes from an authentic world, one of nature and innocence— mountains, meadows, forests, and small villages. Collins places the world of the Capitol in direct opposition—synthetic and simulated, all lights and reflecting surfaces, its citizens vulgar and garish in their ridiculous fashions, some of which have so altered their appearances as to seem more mutation

21  Jacobelly (2003) 21, 26. 22  Latham and Hollister offer an intriguing idea that explains young readers’ deep identification with Katniss in that they too are forced to develop media savvy and image consciousness in order to find their place and succeed in a world which is becoming more and more challenging. Don Latham and Jonathan M. Hollister, “The Games People Play: Information and Media Literacies in The Hunger Games”, Children’s Literature in Education 45 (2014) 33–46.

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than human.23 As such, Collins creates a strict dichotomy between the district residents who seemingly live in a more human pre-modern era and the Capitol citizens who live in an urban technologically advanced future-scape lacking in humanity. This dichotomy becomes sharper still when comparing the eagle, official symbol of Panem, and the mockingjay adopted by the rebels as a symbol at the start of the rebellion. These emblems are a deliberate choice. The mockingjay (a hybridization of two birds) is a simple minor creature, a kind of underdog of the bird kingdom, much like Katniss. By contrast, the eagle was a sacred symbol of Rome which, among other things, adorned the banners of the legions. With the founding of the US it became the central feature of the presidential seal and was chosen as the national bird. Thus, the dichotomy between the mockingjay and the eagle is concordant with the dichotomy between marginality and simplicity on the one hand, and power and imperialism on the other. In Book I of the trilogy, the mockingjay is described as a failed experiment of the Capitol’s. The Capitol tried to create cloned birds that could spy on private conversations in the districts and prevent the next uprising. These clones gradually mingled with the local birds, eventually producing the hybrid mockingjay which could replicate tunes, whistles and human voices. Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Hayward claim that the mockingjay is key to understanding the text given that it is a mutation that failed. It is thus interpreted as understanding that nature cannot be surpassed or circumvented, but also that good can spring from evil intentions. Above all, the mockingjay is a reminder that the Capitol can be defeated.24 The mockingjay becomes a symbol of rebellion against the Capitol and its hybrid status makes it the ultimate totem for Katniss, herself a hybrid creature: masculine and feminine, huntress and fashion icon, simple village girl and deadly killer. Like the mockingjay, Katniss is also a reminder to the Capitol that there are certain phenomena which can’t be controlled. However, Katniss’ hybridity is also linked to her status as gladiator in that gladiators were themselves hybrid creatures: neither citizens nor were they simply slaves; they lived in closed establishments but they had the opportunity to buy their freedom 23  The most obvious example is Effie Trinket, the Capitol’s liaison to District 12, whose outlandish garb is at odds with the drab poverty of the district residents. Another example is the “tiger woman” introduced in Mockingjay, who has altered her features to appear feline. 24  Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Hayward, “Mountain Airs, Mockingjays and Modernity: Songs and their Significance in The Hunger Games”, Science Fiction Film and Television 8.1 (Spring 2015) 75–89.

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(as did all slaves);25 their profession was considered lowly and despised on the one hand, but on the other provided them with status, fame, and fortune.26 In The Hunger Games, Katniss’s hybridity and very existence becomes a threat to the reigning authority.27 1.5

Heterotopias and Punitive Spaces

The arena in The Hunger Games abides by the cultural rules and social codes of the classical gladiator arena: brutal games which take place according to a predetermined plan and subject to a cultural heritage thousands of years old. Conversely, the arena of Collins’ book also takes place in a modern television format. As such, the Games arena is functions as a heterotopic space according to the definition put forth by Michel Foucault. A heterotopia is a kind of anti-space, a location which is real in the sense that it can be identified within a culture and can be connected with any other location in said culture. At the same time, it exists outside of any location, and in this sense is in contradiction with any other locations to which it is tied. Foucault uses this term to describe the way in which defined places that surround the subject weaken him or her to the point of negating his or her identity. Hegemony, which seeks to realize its power and assert it upon the subject, thus defines the subject through his or her compartmentalization from the rest of society.28 Among other things, Foucault discusses the heterotopia of compart­ mentalization—a disciplinary space which enables the physical and social isolation of certain subjects in order to control and correct them, thereby reaffirming the rules of society. This is exemplified by establishments such as prisons, army camps, closed medical institutions, and so on. Most compartmentalizing heterotopias are similar in structure: they are enclosed by a wall which separates those within from the outside world; they are heavily secured 25  Among the gladiators there were many freed slaves who had obtained their freedom and free men from good families who signed up to fight voluntarily. Jacobelly (2003) 20. 26  Jacobelly (2003) 21, 26. 27  The cinematic gladiators who influence Katniss’ characterization are also hybrids: Spartacus was a slave as well as a historical leader of mythic proportions; Maximus was a general who became a lowly slave and then rose back to prominence as a famous gladiator; Judah Ben-Hur was a Jewish nobleman who became a slave and eventually returned to nobility, but this time via the practice of Roman adoption. 28  Foucault, Michel, “Different Spaces” (trans. R. Hurley) in J.D. Faubion (ed.) Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 2, London, (Penguin; 1998) 179–180.

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or guarded; their inner-space is divided according to levels of accessibility and are therefore also constructed according to internal hierarchies and power structures. The Roman gladiator arena is thus an obvious heterotopia: an enclosed, segmented space whose occupants are there for isolation, discipline, and reaffirming the social order. Most of the Roman gladiators were, as can be recalled, criminals, heretics, slaves or captives of war; their marginality enabled their compartmentalization. The games were anchored in legislation and funded by the rulers. The horrors that took place in the arena were normative, part and parcel of preserving the social order.29 Thus, the arena in The Hunger Games is also an obvious heterotopia. The competitors are called “tributes” in order to camouflage the fact that they are children whose deaths are meant to entertain the Capitol. The tributes are isolated in a training camp and tagged with a subcutaneous electronic tracker, essentially making them constantly monitored lab rats.30 As opposed to heterotopic spaces in real life where punishment is also accompanied by an element of correction, in the world of The Hunger Games, the correctional facet is nonexistent since most of the children who enter the arena meet their death. The punishing element therefore takes center stage since the tributes are paying the price for a historical event which occurred over half a century before they were born, making guilt an inseparable part of their experience as well as for the helpless viewers at home in the districts. The games therefore have a significant value in maintaining the hegemony’s power. They make the terror that President Snow exerts on the districts into a fact of daily existence. As a result, the district residents accept the sacrifice of 29  The earliest games documented in Rome from the first half of the third century BCE were held mainly at funerals and memorials in honor of important and wealthy personages, and had a religious dimension, which led to commemorative urns, chalices, and wall inscriptions. The games were highly successful with the masses, funded by the nobility, senators, and other politicians taking the opportunity to win public favor in order to advance their own interests. The Emperor Augustus immediately recognized the connection between popular culture and political capital. He enacted special laws, thus legitimizing the games while setting certain limitations upon them (number of games, number of participants, etc.). Most importantly, he ensured that they could only be funded by the state, likewise ensuring that only the imperial family or its representatives could stage them. Under Augustus’s patronage, hundreds of amphitheaters were constructed all over the empire, their wide dispersion testifying to the multitudes’ eagerness to watch the games. 30  In terms of imagery, this is an allusion to Gilles Deleuze’s description of the transition from a “discipline society” to a “monitor society.” Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” October 59 (Winter 1992) 3–7.

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their children as an unquestionable condition of life, much like the poverty and starvation they face. Even when they mourn their children, they are forbidden from expressing it. This is in keeping with Foucault’s definition that for society at large, the actual and theoretical structures of compartmentalizing heterotopias are natural and even necessary, and are consequently accepted in all the terms and regulations which allow them to function. Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham’s pan-opticon as a tangible expression of heterotopia as a social phenomenon. The punitive space in The Hunger Games is defined by imprisoning, isolating, and oppressing the young gladiators through hidden cameras that capture their every movement. This constant surveillance heightens the cruelty of the games by making the tributes completely exposed and allows the game-makers to actively interfere with what goes on in the arena: flooding it with water, wildfire, and even geneticallyengineered predators.31 Most of these methods are inspired by Roman gladiator tradition where the game-makers also controlled the fates of the contestants, but the added technology of The Hunger Games amplifies the power structure and gives it a new form of control. The trilogy’s games are therefore defined by a power structure with a single point of view: President Snow, the game-makers, the peacekeepers, and any other authority figures can follow the tributes from up close, but the tributes cannot see who is monitoring them. This gives The Hunger Games an added dimension of cruelty borrowed from reality television. In his essay on American Idol, one of the most popular reality shows in America, Henry Jenkins highlights the following: Every reality series starts out with a cast larger than most audience members can grasp, and most of those characters will receive relatively limited airtime. As the winnowing process occurs, however, certain characters will emerge as audience favorites, and a good producer anticipates those interests and rewards them by providing those characters with more airtime. Viewers move from thinking of the characters as generic types toward thinking of the characters as particular individuals. Viewers get to know the contestants: learn their personality, see their motives for competing, view their backgrounds, and, in some cases, meet other members of their families. In American Idol, viewers watch them improve or crash and burn. This may be why American Idol has become such a powerful 31  Pan-opticon means all-seeing. This refers to an incarceration facility based on an architectural plan which allows the watcher to occupy a central tower and thus constantly monitor the inhabitants of each cell.

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marketing tool for launching the careers of young performers compared with earlier televised talent competition. I agree with Jenkins, and would like to further suggest that the same rules of reality television apply here as concerns the intolerable cruelty toward the contestants, the manipulation of the crowd through spectacle, and the winnowing process of candidates, often young and naïve individuals, until they “crash and burn.”32 The mastermind behind the cruelty is President Snow, the very model of the ultimate tyrant. His character is a kind of cross between a corrupt Caesar and a modern dictator highly oriented to mass media communications. As Caesar, Snow executes almost at whim any that disobey or fail to please him by various cruel methods typical of ancient Rome. Thus, for example, he orders Seneca Crane to commit suicide by swallowing the type of poison berries Katniss used to outwit Crane and Snow’s plan to kill her off during the games. Despite this old-fashioned villainy, however, Snow is also adept at manipulating the masses through modern media and exerting his will. Snow’s rule is in fact grounded on superior technology: from an invasive array of hidden cameras (Katniss, like everyone else in the series, feels she is always being watched and recorded even before she enters the arena) to mutant clones used to create monsters to terrify within the arena (the mutant dogs in Book I) and without (the lizard creatures in Book III) to a militarized police force ironically named “peacekeepers” with cutting edge weaponry and armor. 1.6

Roma Aeterna?

There is a distinct connection between the ancient world as we know it from history, literature, and popular culture, and the post-apocalyptic future depicted in The Hunger Games. This connection is based on the importance of imagery and appearances as well as the role of spectacle as a hegemonic tool for controlling the masses, whether in Ancient Rome or the contemporary United States. It would appear that Rome’s story remains unfinished and the phenomenal success of The Hunger Games is a testament to the fact that the themes it deals with are of the utmost importance. Moreover, The Hunger Games

32  Henry Jenkins, “Buying into American Idol: How We Are Being Sold on Reality Television” in Susan Murray and Ouellette Laurie, (eds.), Reality TV: Remaking television culture (New York: NYU Press, 2004) 343–363.

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herald a revival of female gladiator culture in Young Adult fiction. In 2009, for example, Lise Haines’ Girl in the Arena was published, telling the story of Lyn, a young gladiator fighting to avenge the death of her father and win her freedom. In 2012, Arena One: Slaverunners by Morgan Rice was published, chronicling the life of a young girl named Brooke whose young sister is abducted by “slaverunners”—groups that hunt people in order to force them to spar to the death in the arena. Like The Hunger Games, the story is set in a post-apocalyptic vision of the US. It seems then that the abundance of texts returning to ancient Rome and recreating its glory prove that Rome is indeed “eternal”—immortal as its devoted claimed—and the fact that the same imaginary worlds depict a future reality perhaps indicate that Roman culture and heritage will always be inseparable from contemporary culture. The greatness of The Hunger Games lies in its ability to open a window into the past for its young readers, enabling them to make a connection between the uglier aspects of history and the parallel aspects of their own reality, encouraging them to think of their own roles in shaping the future, much like the characters in their beloved books. Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean, America (London and New York: Verso, 1988) (trans. Chris Turner) (English) (Babel, Tel-Aviv, 2000) (trans. Mor Kadishzon) (Hebrew). Byrne, Dierdre, “Dressed for the Part: An Analysis of Clothing in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games Trilogy”, Journal of Literary Studies 31.2 (2015) 43–62. Collins, Suzanne, The Hunger Games (New York, NY: Scholastic, 2008). Collins, Suzanne, Catching Fire (New York, NY: Scholastic, 2009). Collins, Suzanne, Mockingjay (New York, NY: Scholastic, 2010). Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle. (Trans. Ken Krabb) (London: Rebel, 2005) [1967]. Deleuze Gilles, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, October 59 (1992) 3–7. Feig Vishniya, Rachel, “Spectacle and Prejudice: Ancient Rome in Cinema—from Cabiria to Gladiator”, Zmanim 75 (2001) 40–46. Fitzgerald, Jon, and Hayward, Philip, “Mountain Airs, Mockingjays and Modernity: Songs and their Significance in The Hunger Games”, Science Fiction Film and Television 8.1 (2015) 75–89. Foucault, Michel, “Different Spaces” (trans. R. Hurley) in J.D. Faubion (ed.) Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 2 (London: Penguin, 1998) 175–185. Foucault, Michel, Heterotopia (Trans. Ariela Azulay) (Tel-Aviv, Resling, 2003) [1967].

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Hall Alice, “Viewers perceptions of Reality Programs”, Communication Quarterly 54.2 (2006) 191–211. Jacobelly, Luciana, Gladiators at Pompeii (Rome: L’erma di Bretschneider, 2003). Jenkins, Henry, “Buying into American Idol: How We Are Being Sold on Reality Television” in Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (eds.), Reality TV: Remaking television culture (New York: NYU Press, 2004) 343–363. Kyle, Donald G., Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 1998). Latham, Don, and Hollister M. Jonathan, “The Games People Play: Information and Media Literacies in The Hunger Games”, Children’s Literature in Education 45 (2014) 33–46. McGuire, Riley, “Queer Children, Queer Futures: Navigating Life and Death in The Hunger Games”, Mosaic 48.2 (June 2015) 63–76. Mills, Sophie, “Classical Elements and Mythological Archetypes in The Hunger Games”, New Voices in Classical Reception Studies 10 (2015) 1–64. Shatzman, Israel, A History of the Roman Republic (Jerusalem: Magnes & Hebrew University Press, 1990) (Hebrew). Shatzman, Israel, “Aspects and Phenomena of Violence and Cruelty in Rome” in Historia 9 (2002) 23–49. Ringlestein, Yonah, “Real or Not Real: The Hunger Games as Transmediated Religion”, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 25.3 (2013) 372–387. Weimann, Gabriel, Jonathan Cohen and Inbal Bar-Sinai, “Fallen Star: Examining the Relationship between Humiliation on Reality Programs and the Viewers’ Enjoyment”, Misgarot Media: a Journal of Israeli Media 3 (March 2009) 1–26.

CHAPTER 6

“Atalanta Just Married”: A Case Study in Greek Mythology-Based Fan Fiction Amanda Potter Fan fiction is perhaps the most “popular” type of popular fiction, as it is written by the people for the people, rather than being written by a professional writer for profit (although in some cases fan fiction can become profitable, a famous example being Twilight fan fiction turned bestselling novel Fifty Shades of Grey). Novelist and screenwriter Ewan Morrison, commenting on the success of Fifty Shades of Grey in the Guardian online in 2012, offers two potential definitions of fan fiction. His first definition, “the work of amateurs retelling existing stories”, which would include the Bible as fan fiction “as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were non-professionals retelling the same story about the same character”, is ultimately rejected.1 His second and more precise definition is “the reworking of another author’s characters”, which would mean that fan fiction only applies with “the invention of legal authorship in the 18th century through copyright and intellectual property laws”, as “derivative works” can only exist when we have “regulations over what constitutes original works.” In his essay addressing the question “are fan fiction and mythology really the same?” Tony Keen concludes that they are different, but that they are both examples of the broader category of “transformative works”, as “Euripides, Virgil, Ovid, and all the rest are taking the stories of mythology and reinventing them in new forms”.2 Unsurprisingly fan fiction writers themselves disagree on what constitutes fan fiction, and whether stories based on mythology should be included in the genre. As Tony Keen states, some fan fiction writers “seize the opportunity to argue that they are writing in a tradition that stretches way back to the Western

1  Ewan Morrison, “In the Beginning there was Fan Fiction: From the Four Gospels to Fifty Shades”, The Guardian online, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/13/fan-fiction -fifty-shades-grey (accessed 28 February 2016). 2  Tony Keen “Are Fan Fiction and Mythology Really the Same?’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 21 (2016), online.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004346383_008

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tradition of storytelling”.3 However, in a forum discussion on fanfiction.net that I initiated on fan fiction and the ancient world one writer asks: I’m curious about why [stories based on] mythology would be classed as fan fiction? Surely technically, ‘fan fiction’ should be restricted to ‘transformative works’ that can’t actually be published anywhere else? If I wrote a story based on some sort of folklore I wouldn’t be putting it on a fan fiction site.4 The fan fiction community is well-established and offers sites including fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own where writers can post their work and expect it to be read and reviewed by other writers and fans. It is therefore unsurprising that writers inspired by modern media texts, such as the Percy Jackson series of books, as well as those inspired by ancient texts such as the Iliad, use these sites to publish their work, whether or not stories based on mythology do fall under stricter definitions of fan fiction. A search on fanfiction.net early in 2016 for stories including “Achilles” returned 862 stories.5 On the first page featuring fifty stories there was a mix of stories classified by their authors as based on the film Troy (17), Homer, the Iliad or Greek Mythology (12), and stories using the Achilles heel motif based on a range of other texts including Percy Jackson, Samurai Pizza Cats and Supernatural, and a Captain America crossover story “with The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and/or the Iliad”, where “Steve and Bucky are the reincarnations of Achilles and Patroclus”. Many of the writers use modern texts as the basis for their new works, but some also use ancient texts, or “mythology” in general. In the same thread in my forum discussion on fanfiction.net one writer asks whether any female characters from Greek myth actually had any agency, a prerequisite for her interest in writing about them.6 She ultimately discounts

3  Keen (2016). 4  https://www.fanfiction.net/topic/2872/147415372/1/Why-do-fanfiction-writers-often-preferto-write-about-male-characters-rather-than-female-characters (accessed 28 February 2016). 5  Online fan fiction is a growing body of work, and so this number will change as new stories are posted by writers (and less frequently old stories are removed). On fan fiction as a constant “work in progress” see Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, “Introduction: Work in Progress”, in Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (eds.) Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (Jefferson, North Caroline: McFarland, 2006) 6–7. 6  I am using the female pronoun throughout, even where I do not know the gender of respondents, as it is commonly accepted that the majority of fan fiction writers are women, and, as Ika Willis describes it, “the community tends to conceptualize itself as a female”, see

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them all. I am quoting her at length, as it was this comment that initiated my inquiry into fan fiction based on the character of Atalanta: It might be that the “strong” female characters in the ancient world are, in the end, passive as protagonists. The only “active” characters I can think of off the top of my head in Greek and Latin are deities, and then a handful like Hippolyta. Women like Ariadne are not weak at all, but they don’t go challenging Gorgons either. (As for the Gorgon sisters, they didn’t do anything actively either except be prideful, until they got cursed.) You get stories like Dido (who was fairly passive in the Aeneid … fell in love, killed herself when the guy left), Lucretia (got raped, killed herself), Electra (just waited for her bro to save her), Antigone (just killed herself) … Briseis, who just was an accessory, Cassandra, who just got cursed and nobody believed her. They don’t really decide “I’ll save the world!” then run off to the races. Even Atlanta just married. I for one would much rather write about Oedipus than Electra, or Theseus than Hippolyta. Those boys “act”, to make a situation better, not wait for something bad to happen then “react”.7 This writer has a good point to make, and she offers many examples of female characters who lack agency in the ancient sources, but I wondered if some fan fiction writers might have taken up the challenge to re-write the story of a female character from mythology to make her less passive. Instead of focussing on the primary characters from the ancient texts, such as Achilles, characters from Greek mythology that are not explored to any great extent by surviving ancient writers can become principal characters in fan fiction. Another writer responding to the comment on the forum gave an example of an interesting story that she had read that put Paris (who she admits is not a female character, but who is often portrayed as a weaker secondary character) in the role of a protagonist who proactively destroyed his own family. As I was interested in how a less well-known female character could be reinvented by fan fiction writers I decided to look at the character of Atalanta in fan fiction. Dismissed by the writer above as she “just married”, she is one of the few female characters from Greek mythology who could be called a heroine, and I found that she has been the source of inspiration for a number of writers who post their “Classics and/as Fandom, Part 1: Knowing the Past (2014) online, https://thereceptiondesk .org/2014/01/22/classics-andas-fandom-part-1-knowing-the-past/ (accessed 9 April 2016). 7  https://www.fanfiction.net/topic/2872/147415372/1/Why-do-fanfiction-writers-often-preferto-write-about-male-characters-rather-than-female-characters (accessed 28 February 2016).

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work on fanfiction.net (although admittedly far fewer than writers choosing to write about the more well-known character of Achilles). Some of these writers have posted assignments completed for English classes, while others have inserted the original character (OC) of Atalanta into the fictional worlds they are writing about, from Percy Jackson to The Expendables. A search of fanfiction.net for stories featuring “Atalanta” undertaken in March 2016 resulted in 42 stories in English, after removing the stories where Atalanta was a place (a misspelling for Atlanta, Georgia), Atalanta was the name of a reviewer, Atalanta was a name included in the description of the story but there was no reference to Atalanta or the myth in the actual story, or Atalanta was the name of a canonical character (from the Unicorns of Balinor and RunesCape). Before looking at these stories in detail it is first worth summarising the main elements of the story of Atalanta that fan fiction writers could draw on. 1

Atalanta in Greek Mythology

Atalanta is remarkable for five key aspects of her life story, her upbringing, her involvement in the Caledonian boar hunt, her involvement (or inability to take part) in the voyage of the Argo with Jason, her defeat of Peleus in a wrestling match, and the race to decide on her husband. These elements all mark her out as an unusual or even unique woman, and are included in one or more of the main extant ancient sources, Apollodorus’ Bibliotheka, Hyginus’ Fabulae and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Atalanta was exposed at birth, but was saved and suckled by a bear then brought up by hunters.8 She was an able huntress, and when she took part in the Caledonian boar hunt (as the only woman among male heroes) she was the first to hit the boar with an arrow. When Meleager finally killed the boar he gave the skin and/or the head to Atalanta, whom he desired.9 Her defeat of the male hero Peleus in a wrestling match again marks her out as a unique woman, taking part and succeeding in the activities associated with men.10 She is listed as one of the Argonauts by Apollodorus, although in Apollonius’ Argonautica Jason had not permitted her to join the crew of the Argo as he feared the men might fall in love with her and this would cause conflict.11 8   Apollodorus, Bibliotheka, 3.9.2. 9   Apollodorus Bibliotheka 1.8, Ovid, Metamorphoses, 8.317–430 and Hyginus, Fabulae, 173 and 174. 10  Apollodorus, Bibliotheka, 3.9.2. 11  Apollonius, Argonautica, 1.769–773.

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Atalanta’s race is probably the most well-known of the stories about her, and slightly different versions are offered by the ancient writers. She is reconciled with her father, but does not want to marry, and so proposed that she would only marry a man who could beat her in a foot race, and all losers would be killed. As she was an exceptional runner many suitors lost.12 In Hyginus’ Fabulae Atalanta would kill the losing suitors herself with her spear, which she ran with, and she would put their heads up in the stadium,13 and in Apollodorus she ran armed, but in Ovid she ran naked,14 and as Alison Sharrock points out, is “highly eroticized” by the poet.15 A young man, Melanion or Hippomenes, tricked Atalanta by obtaining golden apples from Aphrodite/Venus and throwing them so that Atalanta is distracted and lost the race as she picked up the apples.16 The ending of the story is akin to many other Greek myths where mortals fall foul of the gods and suffer for it. Atalanta is married to the winner of the race, but she and her husband are turned into lions when they have sex in the temple or sanctuary of Zeus/Jupiter, or Cybele.17 In Ovid and Hyginus this is brought about by Aphrodite/Venus as the successful suitor failed to honour her for helping him. Fan fiction writers therefore have a number of different ancient versions of Atalanta’s story to draw on, as well as numerous retellings in modern books on mythology, and in each of these versions, like a male hero, she has her own special abilities; prowess at hunting and speed, and she takes part in different adventures.18 Since the 1990s Atalanta has also appeared as a character in films and television episodes. Notable examples include three episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–1999), Jason and the Argonauts (2000), an episode 12  Apollodorus, Bibliotheka, 3.9.2. 13  Hyginus, Fabulae, 173 and 174, 185. 14  Apollodorus, Bibliotheka, 3.9.2, Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.560–707. 15  Sharrock, Alison, “Warrior Women in Roman Epic”, in Jacqueline Fabre-Serris and Alison Keith (eds.) Women and War in Antiquity (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press) 169–170. 16  Apollodorus, Bibliotheka, 3.9.2, Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.560–707, Hyginus, Fabulae, 185. 17   Apollodorus, Bibliotheka, 3.9.2, Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.560–707, Hyginus, Fabulae, 185. 18  Books on Greek mythology aimed at younger readers often feature the story of Atalanta, including Richard Woff, The British Museum Pocket Dictionary: Heroes and Heroines of Ancient Greece (London: British Museum Press, 2004) 12, Heather Alexander, A Child’s Introduction to Greek Mythology: The Stories of the Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, Monsters and Other Mythical Creatures (New York: Black Dog and Leventhal, 2011) 49–51, Lucy Coats and Anthony Lewis, Atticus the Storyteller’s 100 Greek Myths (London: Orion, 2002) 157– 160, Geraldine McCaughrean, The Orchard Book of Greek Myths (London: Orchard, 1992) 75–77.

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of the BBC series Atlantis (2013–2015) and the film Hercules (2014) based on Steve Moore’s comic series Hercules: The Thracian Wars (2008),19 though reimagined as an Amazon in the film, diverging from her portrayal in the comics. There is, however, no clear evidence that writers of the Atalanta stories from fanfiction.net are drawing on these modern versions of Atalanta as inspiration. Instead the majority of writers create Atalanta as an original character within their fictional world(s) of choice. 2

Atalanta in Fan Fiction

The way in which Atalanta is used by fan fiction writers in these stories can be classified into five main categories; the use of Atalanta as the name of a character only; the use of Atalanta as the name of a character who shares some attributes with the Atalanta from Greek mythology (for example she is a fast runner or a good hunter); the retelling of an aspect of the story of Atalanta (most commonly the story of the race) featuring a character based on Atalanta, which could be set in the Greek mythic past, the modern day, or within a different fictional world; the reuse of the character Atalanta from Greek mythology in a new story; and the reworking of the story of Atalanta using different characters. The table below illustrates how the stories in my sample would be classified, breaking down retelling into three sub categories: Category number

Category

Category description

Number of stories

1.

Name only

25

2.

Name plus attributes

A character is named Atalanta but shares no more similarities with Atalanta from Greek mythology A character is named Atalanta AND shares some similarities with Atalanta from Greek mythology, e.g. she is a fast runner

19  Atalanta also appears in Moore’s sequel, Hercules: The Knives of Kush (2009).

3

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Category number

Category

3a.

Retelling set in a A story from the life of Atalanta world based on Greek from Greek mythology is retold, mythology only featuring the character of Atalanta Retelling set in the A story from the life of Atalanta modern world from Greek mythology is retold in the modern world, featuring a character based on Atalanta Retelling set in a A story from the life of Atalanta different but existing from Greek mythology is retold fictional world in a different world, such as the world of Xena: Warrior Princess (the Xenaverse) featuring a character based on Atalanta Reuse of the The character Atalanta from character of Atalanta Greek mythology is reused in a new story Reworking A story from the life of Atalanta is the inspiration for a story using different characters

3b.

3c.

4. 5.

Category description

Number of stories

2

1

7

3 1

2.1 The Use of Atalanta’s Name Only In most stories Atalanta is used as the name of original character only, and this character has no further link with the story of Atalanta from Greek mythology. This is the case for example in “The Opening Night Review”, by Lorendiac, where Atalanta Wayne is a daughter of Batman and Wonder Woman (and the name of Atalanta from Greek mythology probably seemed appropriate for the daughter of the Amazon Wonder Woman) and “A Study in Pink”, by ThetaWolfe, where Atalanta is the name of Sherlock Holmes’ daemon, an arctic fox, in a crossover story that fuses the mythology from Philip Pulman’s His Dark Materials books with the world of Sherlock Holmes. An original character called Atalanta also appears in Twilight, Harry Potter, My Little Pony, Beast Wars: Transformers, Prison Tale and Star Wars: The Clone Wars stories. I will not

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discuss these stories at length here as although many are well-written and entertaining they do not shed any light on how Atalanta from Greek mythology is represented in fan fiction. By far the most frequent use of an original character called Atalanta is in Percy Jackson stories (discussed below), sometimes in crossover stories with other fandoms, where Atalanta appears in sixteen stories, fifteen of which have no other connections to Atalanta from Greek mythology apart from the name (the other story is a retelling set in the fictional worlds of Percy Jackson and Watership Down, discussed below). The use of an ancient Greek name for an original character in Percy Jackson fan fiction is unsurprising, as the Percy Jackson series of novels by Rick Riordan is based on Greek mythology, with a male protagonist, and so female writers wanting to create a new female protagonist have looked to Greek mythology for a suitable name. The Atalanta from Greek mythology is also mentioned as a heroine in Riordan’s books The Sea of Monsters (2006) and The Mark of Athena (2012), although she never appears as a character in the novels, leaving her available to be written about as an original character. The Atalantas in Percy Jackson fan fiction are variously a female version of Percy, Percy’s sister and daughter of Poseidon, Percy’s daughter, Percy turned into a girl by Artemis, the demigod daughter of various Olympians or other deities (Athena, Hephaestus, Hermes, Khione), a mortal girl chosen by Ares to be a champion, and a female version of Harry Potter who is faced with the Medusa-like Miss Stonesmith, who can turn people to stone when she removes her sunglasses (in the Percy Jackson/Harry Potter crossover story “Fireworks” by Lady Jane Scribbler). Atalanta is usually the heroine of these stories, a “Mary Sue” character who represents the author,20 often a school girl coming to terms with her divine heritage, like the author herself coming to terms with teenage life. Unusually in crossover Percy Jackson/Kane Chronicles stories “Who Ever Said that Sleepovers were Boring” and the sequel “Slaves for a Week”, by arKlight, Atalanta is the villain who tries to break up the relationship between canonical characters Carter and Zia.21

20  On Mary Sue characters see Busse and Hellekson (2006) 11 and Ika Willis, “Keeping Promises to Queer Children: Making Space (for Mary Sue) at Hogwarts” in Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (eds.) Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (Jefferson, North Caroline: McFarland, 2006) 153–170. 21   Kane Chronicles are the Rick Riordan series of novels based on ancient Egyptian mythology.

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2.2 The Use of Atalanta’s Name and Other Attributes Three stories in my sample feature a character named Atalanta with some of the mythological Atalanta’s attributes. In one of the stories Atalanta is a hunter, and in two stories she is a good fighter. Although the Atalanta from Greek mythology is not a warrior, she bested Peleus in a wrestling match, and has the skill to use a bow, and so the stories where Atalanta is a warrior-type character can be included in my categorisation of use of Atalanta’s name and attributes. In “Mirror Image” by Perseia Jackson, the writer’s description encourages us to read this Percy Jackson story, with Atalanta as a female version of Percy, as a re-writing of the story of Atalanta from Greek mythology; “The Story of Atalanta, one of the few female heroes, was never recorded by mortals correctly”. Although there are strong links between the character of Atalanta from Greek mythology and Atalanta in “Mirror Image”, their stories are entirely different. “Mirror Image” is about Atalanta the daughter of Poseidon (like Percy), who is a skilled tracker, a good bowswoman and who loves the hunt (like Atalanta from Greek mythology). In this story she chooses to join the Amazons rather than Artemis and the Hunters, as in the Percy Jackson books the Hunters must remain virgins, whilst the Amazons can have relationships with men. As a great warrior and leader Atalanta is made Queen of the Amazons when the last queen, Kendra (another original character), is killed in battle. In “Atalanta” by Bellerokstarr, the original character of Atalanta is also cast as a warrior, linked with the Amazons, but this time within the world of Young Justice. She is daughter of Poseidon, and granddaughter of Aphrodite, raised in Themiscyra and “trained in the Amazonian ways”. Her name comes “from Greek mythology”, where Atalanta was “a sole female amongst a bunch of male heroes”, and the Atalanta of this story is also part of the mostly masculine world of Young Justice, alongside canonical characters Robin/Tim and Blue Beetle/Jaime (although Wonder Girl/Cassie also appears). Atalanta is a skilled fighter, but gets kidnapped by the Joker and is rescued by her friends. In creating Atalanta as an Amazon character the writer will no doubt be drawing on Wonder Woman as a precedent for her original character, as Young Justice is part of the DC Comics franchise, which is also the home of Wonder Woman. In the final story in this category, the long (14500 words) but unfinished “Greek Warrior meets the Expendables” by Sboyle92, Atalanta is described in the writer’s summary as “a warrior during the high reign of the mighty Greek empire” who “didn’t age”. Atalanta is a mercenary recruited by the canonical male protaginists from The Expendables films to help defeat a gang who are involved in sex trafficking and child slavery. Rather than being motivated by money Atalanta joins the mission to save the victims. Atalanta helps her

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fellow all-male team members through her superior skills as a fighter and a linguist, and with her superior weaponry. With a collection of cars and weapons, extreme self-confidence and a back full of tattoos, Atalanta fits into the hyper-masculine world of The Expendables, and, like the Atalanta from Greek mythology, is exceptional as a female hero in a world of male heroes. The writer categorises the story as Mystery/Adventure, but she is also interested in the potential romantic relationship between characters, which is often the primary interest of fan fiction writers,22 and asks her readers to vote on which of the Expendables will be Atalanta’s lover to help her to progress her story. Unlike the Atalanta from Greek mythology who initially eschews marriage, as a modern heroine Atalanta in “Greek Warrior Meets the Expendables” can have a romantic relationship with a male character while maintaining her independence. 2.3 The Retelling of the Story of Atalanta Six of the stories on fanfiction.net featuring Atalanta are classified by the writers as based on “Greek Mythology”, rather than any modern text, and three of these are retellings. Two of these stories appear to be set in the ancient world, and one in the modern world. “The Calydonian Boar” by Erin7, presents the story of the boar hunt from Atalanta’s point of view. In this story the male hunters have little respect for the huntress, but she has little respect for them. She is given the boar’s head and skin by Meleager and leaves with her trophy at the end of the story, going home to “make an offering to Artemis”. As she leaves “She looked back at the blood and corpses, and shook her head slowly. ‘Men.’ ” ItachiDream advises readers in her notes that her story “A Promise in a Garden” was written as an English assignment, and is set “about 6 years after the race”. Atalanta is in a garden with her husband Hippomenes and their son Meleager, and Hippomenes asks her why she married him. The answer that she gives is that she never goes back on a promise. Both of these stories are very short (700 and 300 words respectively) and both provide us with an insight into Atalanta’s motivations, which are missing from ancient accounts of the story. Both stories could also be seen as feminist retellings. In “The Calydonian Boar” Atalanta is an independent heroine who has no need for the men in the story, and “A Promise in a Garden” shows Atalanta to be an honourable character who keeps her promises, rather than one who was greedy for golden apples or driven by love/lust for Hippomenes. 22  On fan fiction writers’ interest in developing relationships between characters see for example Sheelagh Pugh, “The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context”, Refractory, 5 (2004) online.

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The most inventive of the “Greek mythology” based stories, is also the longest one, at around 6,000 words, “Atalanta”, by HecateA, an experienced fan fiction writer who has posted over three hundred stories across a range of fandoms to fanfiction.net. The writer chose to base her first “Greek myth fanfic” on the story of Atalanta, who was “no damsel in distress”. Described as a “modernised myth”, the story is set in a school, where protagonist Lani is a runner, who receives an online prophecy that she will never marry, when she clicks on the link to “Queen Marie’s free psychic services” with her friends. After she kisses a boy named Teddy, he has a terrible accident, so she decides that to avoid this happening to any other boys she will only go out with a boy who can beat her in a race (knowing that this will not happen as she is the fastest runner in the school). One boy, Mel, wins the race by throwing wads of money to slow her down, with advice from columnist Safi Dite, who knows that Lani needs money for college. Mel becomes Lani’s boyfriend, but they are caught kissing when Lani should be completing a test, and this prevents her from going to college after all. The writer explains who is who at the end of the story for readers who are unfamiliar with the myth (so Lani is Atalanta, Safi Dite is Aphrodite etc.). The writer brings the story of Atalanta into the modern world of school, with the teenage girls’ (and probably the writer’s own) areas of interest and concern; boys, friends and getting into college. Seven stories retell the story of Atalanta’s race within other fictional worlds (Xena: Warrior Princess, Disney’s Hercules the animated series, The Hunger Games, 2 Dragon Ball stories, Final Fantasy and a Percy Jackson/Watership Down crossover story). The two stories for series set in ancient Greece, Xena and Hercules, unsurprisingly include a character called Atalanta who is based on Atalanta from Greek mythology. In “The Race”, an entertaining story by ChapstickLez, the bard Gabrielle, who is Xena’s lover,23 tells the story of Xena and Atalanta in a tavern, in exchange for a bed for the night, food, drink and money. The story is introduced by Gabrielle as A story about how Xena, the Warrior Princess, brought together a man and a woman […] but this was no ordinary woman […] This was one of the strongest, fastest, most daring women ever to be born. In the story within a story Xena is approached by Melanion in a bar, to help him win the heart of Atalanta. Gabrielle and Xena have heard of Atalanta, who is “third generation Amazon”, using the idea that Atalanta’s skills were 23  In the series Xena and Gabrielle’s lesbian relationship is known as the subtext, as the series hints at a sexual relationship but does not confirm this.

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those of an Amazon. Gabrielle relates the story of Atalanta’s unusual upbringing by a she-bear, the Caledonian boar hunt, how she was not allowed to become an Argonaut as she was “too young” (rather than too attractive and so distracting to the male crew members) and that she won a wrestling match with Peleus. Xena agrees to help Melanion by going to Aphrodite on his behalf. Aphrodite is encouraged to “make the match of the decade” by getting “the woman who won’t ever admit to love to fall in love and marry”, and Aphrodite gives Melanion three golden apples. Atalanta is actually thinking that marrying Melanion would not be such a bad thing, and as she runs, naked, she is distracted by the three golden apples and Melanion wins the race. The listeners are pleased with Gabrielle’s story but when Xena and Gabrielle are alone in bed Xena asks why Gabrielle did not tell the “real version” which features a “naked Xena”. Gabrielle replies that as all the men in the tavern would be “thinking about” naked Xena if she had told the real story. This story follows the model of Xena: Warrior Princess television episodes based on Greek mythology, where Xena and Gabrielle intervene in stories from myths.24 Atalanta is a suitable subject for a Xena story, as both Xena and Atalanta are female heroes, and the writer brings in most of the elements of the story of Atalanta from Greek mythology. The addition that Atalanta is descended from the Amazons further embeds her within the world of Xena, where the Amazons are recurring characters, portrayed as strong women who are friends with Xena and Gabrielle. The overall story is cleverly built around the idea that there are different versions of myths, and the story within a story structure works well to emphasise this. “Hercules and the Marathon” by GillyRose is a comic story featuring characters from Disney’s Hercules, the animated series. Like Xena: Warrior Princess, Disney’s Hercules series features episodes based on stories from Greek mythology.25 In “Hercules and the Marathon” Hercules is chosen to train the runner representing Athens in a marathon sponsored by Aphrodite’s Secret lingerie. Atalanta is chosen by Hades to win for Sparta, helping Ares to humiliate Athena when Athens loses. Hades picks Atalanta even though she is not Spartan as she’s “a superlative runner, athlete and huntress” and must have 24  Examples include “Prometheus” (1.8), where Xena and Hercules both help to free Prometheus, “Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts” (1.12), where Xena helps Helen of Troy to escape, and “Ulysses” (2.19), where Xena helps Ulysses avoid the Sirens and string his bow. 25  Examples include “Hercules and the Argonauts” (1.21), where Hercules gets stranded with Jason on the island of the Sirens, “Hercules and the Trojan War” (1.26), where Hercules tries to rescue Homecoming Queen Helen from the Trojan School using a wooden horse and “Hercules and the Dream Date” (1.27), where Aphrodite brings to life Hercules’ perfect woman.

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endurance as “she was raised by bears”. Helen of Troy is chosen to represent Athens even though she is no runner, as an alternative contestant Tempest the Amazon is persuaded against taking part, and on the advice of Hades, Helen’s boyfriend Adonis bets against her, to recoup money he has lost gambling. Hercules tries to train Helen, but, encouraged by his friend Icarus, has to resort to trickery, in obtaining golden apples from Aphrodite, to distract Atalanta, so that Helen can win the race. Atalanta in this story is “beautiful” but “a little rough around the edges” with armpit hair, and using smelly “bear butter” from the “anal glands of a wild forest bred he bear” as her “skin toner and rub down oil”. She is confident that she will win, so when she loses, after searching for the apples, she is at first angry and wants to expose Hercules and Icarus. However, when she finds out that the runner-up wins an “all expense paid ‘Dream Date’ vacation with Prince Hippomene”, who is “gorgeous” she is quite happy to take second place. She gives the golden apples to Adonis, to cover his debts, and so all ends happily. Hercules is unsure whether he has done “wrong” by cheating if all ended up “right”, but is reassured by the less scrupulous Icarus. Like the writer of “The Race”, featuring the characters from Xena: Warrior Princess, the writer of “Hercules and the Marathon” makes good use of canonical characters, who intervene in the story of Atalanta. These characters appear as they do in the series, so for example Aphrodite in “The Race” is interested in getting more temples, and uses the modern colloquial register of the valley girl/beach babe, and Aphrodite in “Hercules and the Marathon” appears “in her famous clam […] in all her hot flamingo pink splendour”. The new character of Atalanta is seamlessly blended into both existing fictional worlds. In “Golden Apples” by silvercistern, Atalanta is recast as Katniss from The Hunger Games. In this story, unlike in the films, but rather following the story of Atalanta, Katniss is an abandoned daughter of a king, who is brought up in the forest to be a great huntress, “swift-footed” and skilled with a bow. Katniss is reclaimed by her father the king, but as a devotee of Artemis she would rather die than marry, and comes up with the idea that only a man who can beat her in a race will be her husband. Her father is pleased with the idea of these “Games” that will be held. Many men lost, until “cunning” Peeta, the baker’s son, who has loved Katniss from afar, obtains three golden apples from Aphrodite, and as Katniss stops to pick them up they cross the finish line together. Peeta offers Katniss the choice of whether to marry him or not, and she consents, as she loves him too, but Aphrodite feels that she has been scorned by Peeta’s magnanimous action. She throws a spear at the couple, but Artemis turns them into a stag and a hind, and the spear glides over their backs. The “swift” and “clever” deer and their offsping still live in the forest, where there exists a grove filled with trees that grow golden apples. The writer mixes the stories of Katniss and Peeta from The Hunger Games, where a reluctant Katniss eventually falls

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for Peeta, with the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes/Melanion, through the context of “Games” (the race or the Hunger Games). They are transformed into deer, rather than lions, to save them, rather than punish them, which brings a happy ending to the story that still remains in keeping with the myth. Whilst “The Golden Apples” follows the story of Atalanta faithfully until the ending, in the two stories by Toni The Mink, set in the world of the manga and animé series Dragon Ball, “The Atalantan Games” and “The Atalantan Games: Round Two”, the Atalanta character, original character Spectra, is not a reluctant bride. As an Atalantan she can only marry a man who beats her in a fight, and she first chooses hero Goku, then his son Goten, unperturbed by the fact the Goku is married and Goten has a girlfriend. Spectra is the villain of the stories, who kidnaps Goku’s wife Chi Chi in the first story, then holds Goten hostage in the second, and when she is finally defeated by Goten’s girlfriend Valese she goes to hell and meets her match in canonical villain character Freeza. The only elements retained from the story of Atalanta in these stories is the idea that Atalanta must marry the man who wins against her (though here it is in a fight rather than a race). These stories, which make Spectra, the Atalanta character, a villain, introduce a new action heroine, Valese, as trained by Goku. It is Valese who ultimately gets her man by winning the contest, and so she too can also be seen as a double for the mythological Atalanta. “Agriatalanta” by SoundSparrow was written as an English exercise, and merges the character of Atalanta with the playable character from Final Fantasy Tactics, the bodyguard/knight Agrias. Atalanta’s origin story is transposed to the world of the game so that when Agriatalanta is exposed at birth she is brought up by “Bull Demons” (which exist in the game) rather than a bear and hunters, and she joins the hunt for the “Riovanian Behemonth” (invented by the writer, although Riovanes does exist in the game as a place). The story then moves away from the mythological Atalanta and provides the origin story of Agriatalanta’s Coral Sword, forged by Hephaestus and delivered by Hermes after Zeus, Hades and Poseidon all fall in love with her. These Olympian gods all appear in the world of Final Fantasy, and the Coral Sword is a recurring weapon, but this origin story is the writer’s own. The Dragon Ball and Final Fantasy stories follow the Japanese manga and animé traditions of storytelling using characters from Greek mythology, for example the animé series Ulysses 31 and Pollon, and the manga and animé series Saint Seiya.26 The inventive but unfinished story, “Atalantarah” by kc256, starts off as a retelling of the story of the race, but moves in a completely different direction, 26  See Amato, Eugenio, “Da Omero a Miyazaki. La Mitologia Classica Negli ‘Anime’ (e nei ‘Manga’) Giapponnesi: Spunti per una Futura Ricerca”, Anabases: Traditions et Réceptions de L’Antiquité, 2006, 4, 275–280.

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albeit one in which the ability of Atalanta from Greek mythology as a runner is integral. In this crossover Percy Jackson/Watership Down story Atalanta is a sprinter who is kidnapped by two girls, who throw golden apples at a fellow competitor to distract Atalanta when she is taking part in a cross country race. Atalanta is rescued by a friend who turns out to be a satyr and is taken to Camp Half Blood, where young demigods are trained in the world of Percy Jackson. Here she finds out the she is daughter of Hermes, and is chosen to go on a quest to England to help the rabbits of Watership Down to defeat the Titan Kronos, as she is such a fast runner she will be able to keep up with the rabbits. In this story the fan fiction writer uses a reworking of the story of Atalanta’s race as a starting-off point for her story, and later brings in the highly original merging of the fictional worlds of Percy Jackson and Watership Down. 2.4 New Stories Featuring Atalanta from Greek Mythology Atalanta is not the protagonist in either “A Forgotten Hero” by ImagineerGirl 39 nor “Wise Girl: The Story of The Proud Warrior” by Moneyqueen. “A Forgotten Hero”, which the writer states was written as an English assignment, tells of the adventures of the original character Anaxadria, Atalanta’s twin sister. Anaxandria is brought up as a warrior in Phoenicia, completing seven tasks, and comes back to Arcadia to kill a demon. Her father is killed so she gives her life for his and is taken up by the gods to be a constellation. Anaxandria’s story has similarities with stories of the male heroes from Greek mythology, particularly that of Herakles, with his successful completion of the twelve labours and final apotheosis. “Wise Girl: The Story of The Proud Warrior” is told from Athena’s point of view, in the first person. Athena is trying to save Artemis’ favourite Atalanta, who has been turned into a lion, as the mythological Atalanta is in the ancient sources, but instead of completing this task Athena falls in love with Hermes. Athena here favours a woman, instead of the male heroes she favours in the ancient sources, and falls in love with another god, again counter to her usual characterisation as a virgin goddess. Both these new stories feature female protagonists, and the mythological heroine Atalanta is eclipsed by the female protagonists in the stories. Atalanta is also a minor character in “The Randomness Has Begun” by Dragon Fire the Hedgehog. Atalanta, together with male heroes, Hercules and Theseus, is trapped in a room with the gods on a time loop, listening to music and eating tacos. No reference to Atalanta’s story is made, she is simply one of a group of heroes, albeit unusual as a female hero, when all the others are male, as in the story of the boar hunt. 2.5 Reuse of the Story of Atalanta The final story in my sample is “Echoes of Atalanta”, a Battlestar Galactica story, by LedaTreize, where there is no overt reference to the myth in the body of

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the story. The writer instead uses the idea that Atalanta’s sexual relationship with Melanion/Hippomenes is ultimately destructive, as they are both turned into lions. “Echoes of Atalanta” has a complex structure, set in a present where Kara Thrace is Lee Adama’s lover, interspersed with Kara’s memories of men she has loved or trained who have been killed. The story starts with an extract of a poem where the narrator is waiting for the courage “to call the lion out to lick my hand”, and ends with Lee holding Kara in “a lion’s embrace”. The writer provides a summary of the story of Atalanta at the end for readers “who do not recognise the mythic theme of Atalanta”. This writer has been inspired by the story of Atalanta to explore the canonical complex relationship between Lee and Kara from Kara’s point of view, so that we see Kara’s inner conflict, as her strong sexual attraction for Lee is at odds with her knowledge that the relationship is dangerous, and her resolve to break away from him. 3

Conclusion and a Postscript

My survey of this eclectic mix of stories reveals that the story of Atalanta from Greek mythology has been a source of inspiration for a number of writers, writing in diverse fandoms. Depending on our preferred definition of fan fiction we could see these stories as the continuation of the long line of different versions of mythic stories reaching back to antiquity. Alternatively we could see them as a very modern phenomenon where late twentieth and early twenty-first century technology allows writers to share stories with fellow writers and readers across the globe. These Atalanta stories are defined by the writers as fitting into a number of story categories in their story descriptions on fanfiction.net, including humour, adventure, drama, romance, friendship, parody, hurt/comfort, angst, family, tragedy, mystery, suspense, crime, fantasy and sci fi. Many of the writers do not necessarily think that their readers will know the myth of Atalanta, so either provide strong clues within the story, or provide a summary of a version of the myth for the reader in the story description, or at the end. For example fan writer HecateA, who “modernised” the myth to place her Atalanta character at school, feels she need to add a summary of some versions of the Atalanta story as “Atalanta isn’t the best known myth out there”. As an active heroine from Greek mythology Atalanta is of interest to writers, including young female writers, looking for an original character as a heroine to place in their stories, but she can also (less frequently) be used as a comic character, or a villain. I have found my categorisation of stories useful to help understand how writers are using the myth of Atalanta in their original creative work. In more

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than half of the stories in my sample I have found that the writers are not engaging with the myth per se, but have used the name of Atalanta as for some reason this name was suitable for their heroines. Of course, as I stated early on in this chapter, the character of Atalanta from Greek mythology can be classed as an unusual or even unique female hero/heroine, and so it is likely that at least some of the writers have chosen the name of this heroine specifically to be the heroine in their stories, perhaps by association conferring heroic qualities on their protagonists. Atalanta, as a strong female heroine, can be seen as empowering for young female readers and writers, particularly when reused in a familiar school setting, like Buffy, the television heroine who goes to high school in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and is the protagonist in much fan fiction.27 The retellings of the story of Atalanta confirm that the race is the most useful element of the myth for writers and perhaps also the most well-known element of the myth (used as the basis for eight of the stories, with the boar hunt used as the basis for the two other stories, although many of the stories mention other elements of the myth in passing). In the case of “The Race” and “Hercules and the Marathon” in particular the writers convincingly build the story of the race into other fictional worlds (the worlds of Xena and Disney’s Hercules respectively). Although only one example was found in my sample, reworking also has great potential for a fan writer to create a new story inspired by the myth, without being constrained by needing to retell any of the original elements. The categories I have proposed could usefully be applied to fan fiction based on other myths and mythical characters, to help us to further understand how fan fiction writers are engaging with Greek mythology. After reading the fan fiction stories that I discuss in this chapter I was inspired to write my own very short Atalanta story, in which I reuse the character of Atalanta from mythology in a new story, which I have posted to fanfiction.net. My story is added below, as a postscript. This is perhaps a more suitable conclusion to a chapter on a topic which can never really have a conclusion, in the ever changing world of “work in progress” that is fanfiction, where stories are continually being added, added to and remodelled, based on new ideas from writers and ideas suggested by reviewers. My conclusion is therefore to add to this growing body of work.

27  On Buffy as an empowering female heroine see for example Jowett, Lorna, Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005) and Pender, Patricia, I’m Buffy and You’re History: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Contemporary Feminism (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016).

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The White Hind

Atalanta first saw the white hind grazing with the herd in a forest clearing. The hind was not white as virgin snow, but the colour of a field of wheat bleached by the sun, shining beside her darker sisters. A prize fit for a King’s daughter. Such a beast was left by the Lady Artemis when brave Iphigenia would be sacrificed at Aulis in times to come, if one were to believe such tales. Atalanta crept away and said nothing of her discovery. The next day Atalanta stepped out into the forest again at first light. This time with her bow. The bow with which she had drawn first blood from the Calydonian boar. Her prize had been the boar’s head and hide, given by Meleager. But Meleager had been hit by the arrow from another bow that day; the arrow of Eros, and had died pining with unrequited love. Atalanta thanked the Lady Artemis that she had never been so smitten by the power of Aphrodite and her mischievous son. The only sound in the forest was the song of the birds. Atalanta, the expert huntress, moved silently. Not a twig broke nor leaf rustled to announce her presence. Hiding behind a hundred year old oak she waited patiently, as a hunter does, and she was not to be unrewarded for her patience. Soon the white hind stepped out, this time alone. Proud and graceful, the hind looked up and sniffed the morning air, as if she was aware of the presence of an intruder in her world. But she did not flee. Atalanta picked up her bow, still silent, as her well-practised hand pulled back the bowstring, on the arrow already resting there. She found her mark but just as she was about to loose the arrow and secure her prize she hesitated. Did Atalanta need another trophy? She was already famed throughout many kingdoms, and needed no more trophies to announce her worthiness. And did the Lady Artemis need another sacrifice? Or would the lady think more kindly on her servant if the white hind should be allowed to live? As Atalanta hesitated the hind turned and ran. What chance there had been was over, and Atalanta returned to the palace. She spoke to no-one of the white hind, and the hind was never to be seen in the forest again. But Atalanta and the white hind had not been alone in the forest that morning. Aphrodite and Artemis, rivals and not sisters, had surveyed the scene. The Lady Artemis nodded and left; she would no longer protect this girl, who had for the first time shown her mortal weakness. And Aphrodite smiled, holding a beautiful golden apple in her beautiful golden hand.

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Bibliography Alexander, Heather, A Child’s Introduction to Greek Mythology: The Stories of the Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, Monsters and Other Mythical Creatures (New York: Black Dog and Leventhal, 2011). Amato, Eugenio, “Da Omero a Miyazaki. La Mitologia Classica Negli ‘Anime’ (e nei ‘Manga’) Giapponnesi: Spunti per una Futura Ricerca”, Anabases: Traditions et Réceptions de L’Antiquité 4 (2006) 275–280. Busse, Kristina and Karen Hellekson, “Introduction: Work in Progress”, in Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (eds.), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (Jefferson, North Caroline: McFarland, 2006). Coats, Lucy and Anthony Lewis, Atticus the Storyteller’s 100 Greek Myths (London: Orion, 2002) 157–160. Jowett, Lorna, Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005). Keen, Tony, “The ‘T’ Stands for Tiberius: Models and Methodologies of Classical Reception in Science Fiction” (2006) online, http://tonykeen.blogspot.co.uk/2006/ 04/t-stands-for-tiberius-models-and.html (accessed 9 April 2016). Keen, Tony, “Are Fan Fiction and Mythology Really the Same?”, Transformative Works and Cultures, 21 (2016) online. McCaughrean, Geraldine, The Orchard Book of Greek Myths (London: Orchard, 1992). Morrison, Ewan, “In the Beginning there was Fan Fiction: From the Four Gospels to Fifty Shades”, The Guardian online, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/ aug/13/fan-fiction-fifty-shades-grey (accessed 28 February 2016). Pender, Patricia, I’m Buffy and You’re History: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Contemporary Feminism (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016). Pugh, Sheelagh “The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context”, Refractory, 5 (2004) (accessed 31 October 2016). Sharrock, Alison, “Warrior Women in Roman Epic”, in Jacqueline Fabre-Serris and Alison Keith (eds.), Women and War in Antiquity (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press) 157–178. Willis, Ika “Classics and/as Fandom, Part 1: Knowing the Past” (2014) online, https:// thereceptiondesk.org/2014/01/22/classics-andas-fandom-part-1-knowing-the-past/ (accessed 9 April 2016). Woff, Richard, The British Museum Pocket Dictionary: Heroes and Heroines of Ancient Greece (London: British Museum Press, 2004).

Part 3 Rewriting Myths of Classical Literature

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CHAPTER 7

The Loves of Achilles: From Epic to Popular Fiction Anne Sinha After the rebirth of Achilles as the absolute hero due to Brad Pitt’s popular in­ terpretation in the blockbuster movie Troy in 2004,1 the character has also come back into the field of fiction at the beginning of the 21st century.2 This phe­ nomenon raises questions not only about the adaptation of the epic, but also about the influence of filmic portrayals in contemporary literature. Wolfgang Petersen’s movie played on two traditions concerning the hero: Achilles as the supreme warrior, and Achilles the prolific lover. The latter stereotype dates from the fifth century BCE, where many different lovers are attributed to him, both men (Patroclus, of course, and Troilus), and women (Briseis, Polyxena, Iphigenia, and less traditional figures such as Penthesilea and Medea).3 In order to reach the widest audience possible, the movie develops simultaneously both the theme of war, with its very impressive battle scenes—which are even bigger in the director’s cut version—but also the theme of love, as Achilles has an intense love relationship with Briseis, unfortunately prevented from con­ tinuing by the war itself. Petersen chooses to present Achilles as strongly hete­ rosexual, by making Patroclus not his companion but his young cousin and therefore eliminating any other sorts of stronger bond. Nevertheless, the film plays also on two levels, and in this way integrates both the classical pederastic

1  The movie was so successful that the studios were able to finance a more personal—which means less commercial but not less spectacular- version, released as ‘director’s cut’ in 2007. The impact of the movie, even though it was not appreciated much by classics scholars, has lead to some academic books like Martin. M. Winkler, Troy: From Homer’s Iliad to Hollywood Epic (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006); Kostas Myrsiades (ed.), Reading Homer: Film and Text (Madison/Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009); M.M. Winkler (ed.), Return to Troy, New Essays on the Hollywood Epic (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2015). For a general history of Homer’s adaptations on the screen, see also “Homer on the silver screen”, in Joanna Paul, Film and the Classical Epic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 37–92. 2  For the French field, which will not be explored here, see Vincent Delecroix, Tombeau d’Achille (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), Charles Ficat, La colère d’Achille (Paris: Bartillat, 2006), Marie Richeux, Achille (Paris: Sabine Wespieser éditeur, 2015). 3  On these love stories, studied from the angle of intertextuality, see the very useful book by Marco Fantuzzi, Achilles in Love, Intertextual Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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readings about the hero, but also the trend towards double meaning found in some sword and sandal movies.4 As Andreas Krass writes: On the one hand it enhances the intimacy of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, on the other it sends strong signals that discour­ age possible suspicions of homosexuality.5 By integrating what Krass calls “queer moments”—such as the training fight between Achilles and Patroclus, or the transfer of the armour and of the shell necklace6—the movie mildly allows a homosexual reading but intends in its main discourse not to alarm the heterosexual audience. This theme of Achilles as supreme lover as well as fighter is developed in two very different recent novels, The Song of Achilles, written by Madeline Miller in 2011, and Achilles, a Love Story, self-published on different internet platforms by Bryne Fone in 2013. Both books centre their plots on Achilles’ life, seen through the loving eyes of a man, Patroclus in Miller’s book and Antilochus in Fone’s. Both authors are scholars in fields that are pertinent to the subject of their book: Miller teaches Greek and Latin and Fone is an emeritus professor of English literature and specialist in Gay Studies. Their writing choices are dif­ ferent, however: Miller wants to introduce not only the characters of Achilles and Patroclus, but also Homer’s Iliad as well, to the general public, by choosing to adapt the revered epic in the much more popular genre of the novel and by focusing on the psychology of the heroes, which she depicts as very universal. Fone has a narrower target. He writes a love story between men, in a world when women have no place, and plays openly with the homosexual codes. His sentimental, and sometimes erotic, novel belongs in a part to the field of fan fiction, understood as an adaption written and shared freely in a community of people sharing the same interest in a fictional character.7 Interestingly, he 4  On this question see Michael G. Cornelius (ed.), Of Muscles and Men: Essays on the Sword and Sandal Film, (Jefferson-London: Mc Farland &Co Inc, 2011), particularly Robert C. Pirro, “Homer’s lies, Brad Pitt’s thighs”, 104–123. 5  Andreas Krass, “Over His Dead Body: Male Friendship in Homer’s Iliad and Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004)”, in Almut-Barbara Enger and Jon Solomon (eds.), Ancient Worlds in Film and Television. Gender and Politics, (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2013) 153–73, and specifi‑ cally 167. 6  The necklace given by Thetis to Achilles, who gives it to Patroclus then to Briseis. This puts the relationships on the same level but in the end seems like a heterosexual choice, Ibid., 170. 7  It belongs to a special kind of fan fiction consisting of homoerotic rewriting of the relation­ ships between two heroes, called “slash fiction”, taking its name from the punctuating “slash” in the “Kirk/Spock” erotic fan fiction written in the 1960s, by Star Trek series fans. On the

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seems to refer as much to the Iliad as to the character of Achilles embodied by Brad Pitt in Petersen’s movie.8 The book mixes a rather scholarly informed retelling of the war at Troy with a sentimental depiction of an Achilles, seen mostly through the eyes of an obsessed young Antilochus, as the sexiest man alive. Antilochus, mentioned in the Iliad as the one closest to Achilles after Patroclus, appears here as the biggest fan of the hero Achilles9 and can be in­ terpreted as a reflexive incarnation of the fan fiction codes which Bone has chosen to play with. This use of the same material, a mythological love story between two men, has different target audiences; where Miller focuses on the universal, Fone plays on the shared code of a community, in this case, the gay community. The ancient world is used in Miller’s work to represent a common cultural origin which should be appreciated, while Fone goes back to the vision of ancient Greece as a ‘gay paradise’, developed in the 19th century against the repres­ sion and the condemnation of what began to be called homosexuality.10 As he writes in his book Homophobia, a history: Figuring in the imaginative re-creation of Greek antiquity has been the perception of those centuries as a golden age in which homosexual be­ haviour was not just condoned but associated with the highest social, spiritual, and moral values. The idea of Greece as a utopia in which ho­ mosexual love flourished without blame or censure has been central to the defense of same-sex love from the Renaissance to the present day.11 In a complex interaction, this essentialist idea of “Greek love” has been used both in medical and psychiatric discourses against same sex relations as well as genre of fan fiction itself see Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (eds.), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Compagny, Inc, 2006) and Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (eds.), The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (Iowa City: University of Iowa City Press, 2014), and Amanda Potter’s chapter in this volume. 8   For example, in this description of Achilles: “Achilles, my dream, stood there, bare-chest­ ed, wearing only a short linen skirt-like garment”, Fone (2013) 25. 9   Antilochus says he could have had a happy life with his charioteer, “Had not Achilles intervened. Not Achilles the man, but Achilles the myth, the ideal, the very image of unat­ tainable love”, Fone (2013) 215. 10  Michel Foucault in Histoire de la sexualité. La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) has shown how the discourse on same sex relations has moved from considering an act to considering the identity of the “homosexual”, 65. 11  Bryne Fone, Homophobia, a history (New York, Metropolitan Books, 2000), 25.

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militant discourses in favour of a homosexual identity and culture.12 Fone fol­ lows the trend of writers like John Addington Sydmons, Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, whose artistic and political projects he has studied in his gay studies works.13 His fiction taking place in a Greece presented as “the lost fatherland of homosexuals”14 has to be understood not just as a fantasy addressed to a com­ munity but also as part of a political movement against homophobia. This difference also influences the timeframe utilized in each work. The Song of Achilles focuses on the strong and tender relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, from the moment they meet in childhood in the island of Phtia to their death during the war against Troy. The story, narrated by Patroclus, is divided into two main parts: the first describes their exclusive relationship when they were raised together in Phtia and then later in the idealised, natu­ ral landscape on the Mount Pelion by Chiron. An interlude follows, dealing with the events on the island of Scyros, where Achilles has been hidden by his mother, dressed as a girl among the King Lycomedes’ daughters and where the couple first meet obstacles with Deidamia, who becomes very jealous of their exclusive relationship and more importantly, with the Greek leaders who come to bring Achilles to war. The second part takes place on the battlefield of Troy and ends when the two lovers are reunited in death. Achilles, a Love Story focuses on a shorter period, and tells the story of the rather unhappy passion of Antilochus, son of Nestor, told by the character himself, for the mythical hero Achilles. The story starts with the childhood of Antilochus, who develops an obsession with Achilles as he hears more and more about the powerful hero, then continues on the battlefield of Troy where he has joined the object of his love and his companion, Patroclus, who is the main obstacle to the love story. In a similar way, the novel ends with the death of the three protagonists, who are buried in the same tomb. Both authors face the same challenge of using their scholarly aptitude to rework the ancient material of an epic known as the first literary work of the western world, while at the same time creating entertaining popular fiction. Their publishing strategies aim to convince the reader that they have those two skills.

12  On this complex circulation see “Les Grecs contre les psychiatres”, in Didier Eribon, Réflexions sur la question gay (Paris: Champs Essais, Flammarion, 1996) 285–294, and Julie Mazaleigue-Labaste, “De l’amour socratique à l’homosexualité grecque”, Romantisme, 19 (2013) 35–46. 13  See Fone (1992) and (2000), 288–315. 14  Fone (2000), 290.

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Selling the Great Greek Myth

The title chosen by Miller retains a reference to epic through the use of the word ‘song’, though it is not the song that Achilles composes himself about “the famous deeds of fighting heroes” in Iliad’15 but the story told by Patroclus after his death to Thetis, who has come to visit their tomb.16 Even though the focus is also much more on the feelings of the protagonists than on the events of the war, the cover of the British edition plays on the theme of war, with the image of a breastplate. The French publisher goes further by choosing a draw­ ing from the 18th century painter Philipp Otto Runge, representing Achilles fighting against the Scamander. This illustration is an indication of the main theme of the novel, but also a signal of “classical good taste” sent to the reader. Fone, with his title, Achilles a Love Story, explicitly shows that his version of the story belongs to another genre. The subtitle, A Novel of the Trojan War, gives more generic information and presents the book as part of a trilogy, which in­ cludes Trojan Women and War Stories. Interestingly, on Amazon, a new subtitle has been added: “a Gay Novel of the Trojan war”, which seems to be for market­ ing purposes. In the same way, the choice of cover, in both print and kindle version, which reproduces the very classical portrait, “The wrath of Achilles” by Léon Bénouville, where the nudity of the hero had no special erotic value, emphasises the erotically gay dimension of the novel by a special setting which puts the title right below the hero’s genitals. Nevertheless, although the two books are marketed in very different ways, one stressing the grandeur of the epic genre and the other openly playing on the eroticism as a selling point, both books insist on the scholarship of their authors in their short biographies. Fone highlights his academic background in the field of Gay Studies: Byrne Fone is the author of several books in Gay Studies including Homophobia: A History. He is the editor of the Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the City University of New York. He lives in France.17 The dedication, “To Alain: My love story”, also gives the novel a personal and erotic dimension, while the mention of France as his place of residency per­ haps also plays on the clichéd image of France as the country of love. 15   Il. 9 189. 16  ‘Have you no more memories?—I am made of memories.—Speak then.’, Miller (2011) 350. 17  Fone (2013) back cover.

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Similarly, Miller’s biography stresses her academic qualifications: Madeline Miller has a BA and MA from Brown University in Latin and Ancient Greek, and has been teaching both for the past nine years. She has also studied at the Yale School of Drama, specializing in adapting clas­ sical tales to a modern audience. The Song of Achilles is her first novel.18 The publisher emphasises both skills of his author, who has a strong classi­ cal background, as student and then as teacher, but has also been trained in creative writing, qualifications that are intended to guarantee both accuracy in the treatment of the ancient material and an entertaining book. Many press articles accentuate the fact that she spent ten years writing the book, using this as a sign of quality and a reminder of the great work required when a poet dares to take up the challenge of writing an epic. Miller’s blog,19 which includes informative notes and plans to have course materials on the Iliad, also builds on this attitude of the writer as a scholar. The list of glowing review comments on the novel—there are nineteen of them on the first page of Miller’s book—stresses the same theme. Donna Tartt’s shortened quotation on the cover “Captivating … A hard book to put down” underlines the entertaining quality of the book. If we look at the longer quotation, Dona Tartt seems also to insist on the scholarly skills of the author, even though the description is rather strange: “A hard book to put down, and any classicist will be enthralled by her characterisation of the goddess Thetis, which carries the true savagery and chill of antiquity”.20 What exactly the ‘sav­ agery’ and ‘chill’ referred to are is not clear, since Thetis is depicted in the book as a very down-to-earth jealous mother; nor is it clear what connotation ‘an­ tiquity’ has in this context, and why it is regarded as truly savage and chill. Tart seems here to refer, not to the antiquity about which the author has scholarly knowledge, but to a vast universe of mysteries and myths which provide the precious source material for engaging fiction. The same confusion appears in Helen Simonson’s quotation, to which the French edition has given a special place:21 18  Miller (2011), back cover. 19  www.madelinemiller.com. 20  In the French edition, the quotation has been cut without the ellipsis “A book hard to put down; The whole savagery and chill of the Antiquity.” 21  The last sentence was cut by the publisher; although a good novel has to be accurate, neither the reference to Margaret Atwood’s book, relatively unknown to French audience, nor the mention of the high school, would be a selling point.

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I loved the book. The language was timeless, the historical details were slipped in perfectly. I hope The Song of Achilles becomes part of the high school summer reading lists alongside Penelopiad. This mention of historical details in connection with a novel rewriting the Iliad shows the usual confusion between myth and history, presented under the general label of ‘antiquity’. This confusion between myth and history and the need to show some his­ torical background can also be observed in Fone’s Afterword, in which he gives a kind of ‘state of the question’ about current research concerning the histori­ cal aspects of the Trojan war, and then moves on to the visits paid to the city by Xerxes, Alexander and Julius Caesar. He ends his Afterword by explaining that his story has remained within the framework set out by Homer, since Antilochus is presented there as being the second closest hero to Achilles after Patroclus. He also explains his use of apocryphal excerpts from an ancient his­ torian to structure his novel, and to give essential information about the gen­ eral story of the Trojan war: The voice of the Fifth century BCE Dionysos of Tenedos is also my in­ vention, as is his text, The History of the War at Troy, ‘excerpts’ of which preface each of the books of this work. But had he existed as the historian I imagine him to be, the story of the war at Troy would have been for him the most gripping tale he had to tell.22 The world ‘tale’, even though the border between muthos and logos was mov­ ing in Antiquity, shows Fone’s understanding of antiquity as a general, cultural background, a mix of historical, mythical and fictional references, which cre­ ate a totality. Thus, a shocking anachronism can disturb the reading, in the same way that a modern pair of shoes worn by an actor in the scene of a sword and sandal movie would break the illusion of reality. The pseudo-historical extracts are also used as a sub-thread that allows the main story told by Antilochus to focus on his emotional and erotic life. The mention of the fifth century is far from random, partly because, in order to be a credible historian figure, he must be born in the same century than Herodotus and Thucydides, but also because Fone’s mental picture of Greece is that of the fifth century B.C.E. His narrator, Antilochus, explains his understanding of the pederastic system: 22  Fone (2013) 227.

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As the world knows, in most of the lands of Greece it is the custom for men not yet married to take younger men—youths in their late teens— as lovers until the older finally chooses a wife (…) For the younger man it is flattering to be sought out by a handsome older man and to find in his arms an outlet for the burning passions that rage in the loins of the young. For the older, it allows him repeated access to the flower and vigor and glory of youth. But it is more than that. Our world is a man’s world in which woman have little part.23 Antilochus also strongly insists on the superiority of love between men: These unions between two good men, one the older and wiser and expe­ rienced in the life of the world, the other younger and eager to become part of that world, produce true and noble offspring of the spirit … Such men are married by a far closer tie and have a stronger friendship than those who beget mortal children. This, at least, is what I was taught in school.24 This view developed by the character echoes to some lines written by Fone himself in one of his academic publications. In his anthology Hidden Heritage: History and the Gay Imagination, he writes that: Curiously, the Greeks didn’t have a word for it, their literature and legends were full of tales of the love of men…. Homosexuality was, in Dorian Greece, and to a lesser extent in Attic Greece, legal, sanctioned, praised; it was invested with a religious and ethical significance, central to the maintenance of the state and the development of manly virtue.25 Even though Fone applies the modern term of homosexuality to the very codi­ fied institution of pederasty in a questionable manner, his interpretation of Achilles and Patroclus’ bond as erotic has its roots in a very ancient tradition. 23  Ibid., 11. 24  Ibid., 12. 25  B. Fone, Hidden Heritage. History and the Gay Imagination. An anthology (New York: Advocation pub, 1980.), introduction, ix. Fone introduces this way the extract chosen from the Iliad, the visit as a ghost of Patroclus to Achilles to ask him to take care of his fu­ neral: “Whatever the truth of the situation, the Iliad came to be seen as essentially a poem motivated by the love of one man for another, a view point which is not much taught in schools now” (79).

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The Erotic Tradition Concerning Achilles

Although the Iliad itself describes nothing more than a very intense friend­ ship, some later authors have proposed an erotic interpretation based on the intensity of the grief felt by Achilles when Patroclus died. Despite Xenophon’s opi­nion that it was a wrong interpretation of Homer’s silence,26 many claimed, like Aeschines, that Homer’s silence was “telling”.27 The earliest extant text to speak about an erotic bond between the two heroes is a fragment from Aeschylus’ lost tragedy The Myrmidons, which clearly evokes homoerotic re­ lationships: “You show no reverence for (my) chaste respect of your thighs, oh ungraceful for (my) many kisses”,28 as well as in Sophocles’ lost play, Loves of Achilles.29 The relationship was later analyzed by Plato in pederastic terms, in which the debate concentrated on to the question of the respective roles of the two characters.30 More interesting than the answer to the question of knowing who was the eromenos and who was the erastes, this debate shows that this pederastic frame, with very specific categories of age, status and characters, did not exactly fit the relationship of the two Homeric characters. While from Latin poets to medieval authors, the interest in Achilles’ love life moved towards his female partners (with a growing interest for Polyxena),31 ignoring the question of the special bond between Achilles and Patroclus, the modern academic analyses of the Iliadic duo are now mainly ‘homo-sceptical’.32 From Kenneth Dover’s conclusion that there was not enough evidence to make

26   Symposium 8.31. 27   Tim. 142. 28  Fragment 135 in Stefan Radt (ed.), Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (vol. 3) (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009, 1985), translated by Michelakis Pantelis in Achilles in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For a full analysis see Marco Fantuzzi, Achilles in Love, Intertextual Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012) 216–221. 29  Fragments 149–157 in Stefan Radt (ed.), Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (vol. 4) (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999, 1977). 30   Symposium 179 e-180b. Phaidros says that Achilles was Patroclus’ eromenos and that he took revenge for his death out of love. Most of authors develops the opposite idea, as in the Iliad (XI. 786), Patroclus is presented as older. 31  Katherin C. King, Achilles. Paradigms of the War hero from Homer to the Middle Ages (Bekerley: University of California Press, 1987) specifically chapter 5 “Soldier of Love: Archaic Greece to Medieval Europe”, 171–217. 32  I borrow this expression from Fantuzzi (2012) 232. See the synthesis of the two sides on the question made by Bernard Sergent in Homosexualité et initiation chez les peuples indoeuropéens (Paris: Payot 1996), 288, note n°4.

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any such assertion,33 the debate has moved from the field of social representa­ tions and taboos to generic questions. David Halperin argues that “rather than viewing heroic comradeship as the origin of ‘Greek love’ ”, it should be seen as “the final playing in the Greek epic, of an earlier narrative tradition”.34 In the same vein, Marco Fantuzzi argues that “in the terms of the poetics of the epic genre, Homer had no interest in emphasizing an erotic ontology of this excep­ tional intensity”.35 This generic question about love being a non epic theme can be seen in the two different representations of the Achilles-Patroclus duo in Statius’ epic work. In the Thebaid, in which they are evoked thought the pair of comrades Hopleus and Dymas,36 there is absolutely no erotic dimension, whereas the Achilleid,37 that seems to have initiated a totally different type of epic centred on a character,38 mentions the great love for Achilles that led Patroclus to be educated by Chiron.39 What could have been initiated in a new type of epic, had the Achilleid been completed, fits naturally in the novel genre. Furthermore, this introduction of the theme of love to the story of Achilles in these novelizations of the epic, is, in Miller’s and Fone’s books, a generic signal of popular fiction, in which love stories are an important hallmark.40 3

Love and War

This focus on Achilles’ love story, therefore, is not so much a return to the an­ cient interpretation found in Aeschylus and Plato from which Miller says she 33  “We would reasonably attribute the poet’s silence to the absence of any erotic ele­ ment from the relationship as he envisaged it”, in Kenneth Dover, Greek homosexuality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978) 197. 34  David Halperin, One hundred years of homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1989) 87. 35  Fantuzzi (2012) 193. 36  Statius, Thebaid, 10, 347–448. Statius rewrites the episode of Nisus and Euryalus from Virgil’s Aeneid 9, that was already reworking the Achilles and Patroclus duo, but he re­ places the virgilian pius amor between the two by pietas. See Fantuzzi (2012) 260–265. 37  Statius, Achilleid, I, 174–175. 38  See Fernand Delarue, Stace, poète épique: originalité et cohérence (Louvain-Paris: Peeters, 2000), and François Ripoll and Jean Soubiran (trans. and intro), Stace, Achilléide (LouvainParis: Peeters, 2008). 39  Fernand Delarue, “Le Romanesque dans l’Achilléide de Stace”, Ars Scribendi, 3 http://ars -scribendi.ens-lyon.fr/spip.php?article10. 40  On these different strands of narrative (love, adventure, detective and fantastic stories), see Daniel Compère, Les Romans populaires (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012) 102–111.

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has stolen the idea,41 as it is a sign of adaptation of the epic material into a modern type of fiction. The move from epic to novel is shown by the use of an internal narrator, which allows a spotlight to be shone on the feelings of the character. Miller’s narrator is Patroclus himself. At the end of the novel, the meaning of the title becomes clear. Patroclus, who shares with Achilles a tomb, but anonymously, has a conversation with Thetis, who has always hated him, and he composes “the Song of Achilles” for her. This structure, which re­ verses the song sung ‘by Achilles’ into the song ‘about Achilles’ plays on the scene in Iliad 9, when Achilles sang “the deeds of the heroes”, while Patroclus sits alone in front of him, “waiting for when Achilles would end his singing”,42 a scene which Nagy has interpreted as a relay performance.43 This relay is at the centre of Miller’s project, for she was not interested in Achilles as such, but in Patroclus, wanting to understand the mystery of the man at the heart of the story, whose death was the only thing that could drive Achilles back to the battle field.44 Her novel gives another perspective on the hero, conveyed by an internal character emotionally attached to the story, rather than by an external narrator inspired by a muse. Using the same method of creating an alternative discourse to the Iliad, Fone in his work gives voice to Antilochus, of whom he says “[he] appears only briefly in the Iliad and the Odyssey but in both epics Homer hints, tantalizingly, at intimacy between Antilochus and the great hero Achilles”.45 This young man is “obsessed with Achilles”46 and his version of the story, which devotes a great deal of attention to his desire, not only for Achilles but also for older men in general, is balanced with the extracts of the fictional historian, Dionysos of 41  http://www.madelinemiller.com/q-a-the-song-of-achilles. Many thanks to one reviewer for bringing this interview to my attention. 42   Il. 9. 191. 43  Gregory Nagy, Poetry as performance: Homer and beyond, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 72. 44  In an interview by J. Purcell available on her website. 45  “From these few lines of Homer I have written a tale told, so far as I know, by no other writer”, Fone (2013) 226. Fone has insisted in his previous academic works on this secret meaning that needs to be uncovered. “Homer has many occasions to speak of Patroklos and Achilles; but he maintains silence on their eros and the specification of their love, judging that the extraordinary degree of their affection was obvious to sensitive readers”, Fone (1980) 142. Similarly, in the preface of his book about Whitman’s poetry, he writes “My purpose was to listen to and translate the erotic voices, both hidden and evident”, Masculine landscapes: Walt Whitman and the homoerotic text (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), preface ix. 46  Fone (2013) 10.

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Tenedos, who gives general explanations about the many issues of the war at Troy. Each extract begins with a quotation of the Iliad but does not necessarily follow its narrative thereafter. This structure allows Fone to develop the erotic element in the account of the events given by Antilochus, for this element is thus counterbalanced by the ‘seriousness’ of the ‘historical’ voice, understood as a guarantee of the military character of the story. For example, in the episode of the embassy to give back Chriseis, Dionysos’ text explains the role played by Apollo in the story and mentions the fact that Antilochus participates in the mission, even though he does not appear in Iliad 1. Antilochus’ narration on the other hand focuses on much more personal considerations and particularly on his growing interest for the priest’s slave: “My eyes met Ariston’s. I knew then that I would know more of him before the night was done”.47 His reaction to Patroclus’ coming death shows a major turn brought about by the adaptation of the epic material to sentimental novel’s code: Did I lament? Did I rush to his side? Did I shout for him to turn back? No, I did not. Deep within me a terrible voice whispered, the soft whisperer drowning out the din of war: “Patroclus will die. Achilles will be yours.”48 While Patroclus’ death is the turning point of the Iliad that will bring Achilles back to the battle field and then allow the war to come to an end, here the episode is seen only through the narrow viewpoint of a jealous character. Continuing the change from martial epic to sentimental novel, the war is even used as a metaphor for love: “He looked at me with those famous eyes, a glance like a javelin hurled into your heart.”49 The theme of war itself can even have clear erotic overtones, as in the sword-training scene that takes place between Achilles and Antilochus, and which can be read as an openly erotic rewriting of the scene of the movie Troy between Achilles and Patroclus, when Achilles manages to disarm his young cousin. Where the scene in the movie is played with a discreet homoerotic double meaning,50 Fone openly displays this aspect:

47  Ibid., 126. 48  Ibid., 196. 49  Ibid., 17. 50  As Andreas Krass interprets it “When Achilles is shown as a warrior teaching his youthful cousin (nephew rather) how to handle the sword, the audience is reminded of the ancient concept of pederasty”, Krass (1987) 167.

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I lay there breathless and looked up into his grey eyes, feeling his breath on my face, the drops of his sweat falling on my naked chest (…) If I could have freed myself I longed to throw my arms around him, pull him to me, kiss him, and let him do what he wanted, pierce me with a better sword.51 The last rather explicit metaphor demonstrates the limit of this thematic substitution,52 but also the freedom given by the double-voice narration which allows the ‘fan like’ narrator, Antilochus, to indulge in his fantasies, since the fictional historian’s voice will broaden the perspective. His narrator retells his own sentimental version of the Iliad as an erotic movie in which he could act. The light-hearted and playful tone of this rewriting of the Iliad is openly shown by Fone, who uses metapoetic mentions like “What came after has already been taken up by the bards and turned into legend”53 in order to underline the distance between his book and the war epic, but also to demonstrate in a humorous manner, the pleasure of giving new versions of well-known events. 4

Universal or Community

If these two novels focus on the theme of the love story, keeping war in the background, they treat it in very different ways. Where Miller keeps the Iliadic universe as a place where there is no word for love between men,54 Fone in­ terprets it through the pederastic framework. In his novel, Patroclus is pre­ sented as older and taller that Achilles, as in the Iliad,55 but also as his mentor and teacher,56 and therefore fits into the category of the erastes. Antilochus is younger and will, in some way, be Achilles’ eromenos. His fascination with 51  Fone (2013) 35. 52  In the same manner the story of the deadly passion between Achilles and Troilus is told to Antilochus by a Cretan merchant who becomes his lover as an arousing sadist-masochist tale, ibid., 22. 53  Ibid., 203. See also “all their songs will be about the horrible consequence of the wrath of Achilles, who killed for love”, 206. 54  It is all the more striking that she often uses Greek terms in italics in the novel: “ ‘I forgot to say I whished him for a companion’. Therapon, was the world he used”, Miller (2011) 35 or “ ‘I will still be Aristos Achaion’. Best of the Greeks.” (166); “ ‘Philtatos’ Achilles says, sharply. Most beloved”, (333). 55  Fone (2013) 18. 56  Ibid., 19: “And so Peleus wisely agreed that Patroclus should be Achilles’ mentor and teacher. But they were far more than that. In short, they became lovers.”

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the couple reflects Fone’s desire to explore the two heroes who have become a myth: “Achilles and Patroclus. They are legends, these strong and handsome men. They are the world’s most famous lovers and they well know it.”57 Achilles is the reason why the young Antilochus comes to the battlefield of Troy, a far from unique example of pederasty as a motivator of military prowess:58 He (Antilochus) came to find the man he loved more than any other in the world. He fought not for glory or for gain, but for love. Here is the story hinted at in the ancient tale: Antilochus loved Achilles who, alas, loved another.59 The relationships between men appear to be rather straightforward. Achilles is described as brutal in his seduction,60 even though he will develop some at­ tachment to Antilochus. His relationship with Patroclus is an open one: But it was soon clear that fidelity was not a part of their relationship. Patroclus, I discovered, had a sweet eye for his charioteer Automedon, and I got the distinct impression as I massaged his smoothly muscled body with oil that if he had not been tired and Achilles not there I might have been another trophy for Patroclus.61 The world described by Fone is mainly homoerotic with only two main char­ acters showing interest in women in two opposite ways: Agamemnon, who is the incarnation of lust,62 and Odysseus, who longs only for his wife.63 This 57  Ibid., 90–91. 58  See Fantuzzi (2012) 222 and D. Ogden, “Homosexuality and Warfare in Ancient Greece”, in Alan B. Lloyd (ed.) Battle in Antiquity (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2009) 123–125. 59  Fone (2013) 9. 60  “We were alone. There was no preamble. No courtship gesture. It was quick. He was—as I had heard- brutal. I didn’t care. Whatever he wanted, I did”, Ibid., 26. 61  Ibid., 27. 62  “Who but this king, whose rape of innocent women and indecent wallowing in the arms of drunken whores has dishonored his own crown, could be so vile as to dishonor those whose deeds prove that what the poet says is true: When an army of lovers fight at each other’s side, although a few, they can overcome the world”, ibid., 143. Agamemnon also indulged in homophobic jokes (e.g. 139). 63  In chap 15, he’s asking Chriseis for divination about his wife and son. “Though he was still the shrewd and crafty Odysseus, war lord and advisor to Agamemnon, king of kings, and chief strategist … he was a husband longing for news of a beloved wife”, ibid., 118.

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a­ ttraction is presented as a weakness and female characters have very little part in the novel and never appear to be very attractive: Helen, who has not been seen for years, is described as aging.64 Briseis and Chriseis65 are depicted as very close, with Briseis being the servant of Chriseis, as if women had to share the same unique and closed universe, which doesn’t allow them to exist as full individuals. In the novel, only relationships with men—which are either straightfor­ wardly for erotic satisfaction or deeply sentimental,66 or even conjugal67—are praised. Miller, on the other hand, chooses to narrate a love story between two in­ dividuals and does not play on any ‘gay code’. Patroclus and Achilles discover their attraction, without naming it. In the first part of the novel, they find each other on the island of Phtia, to where Patroclus is exiled after having killed another child by mistake. Having a very strong sense of guilt, he is a loner, as is Achilles, who, even though admired by all the other children who are raised under his father’s care, has no companion either. Later they are sent to Mount Pelion to be educated alone by Chiron in a secluded cave. Even when the war forces them to mix with others, they again manage to create their own universe. In Miller’s work, the question of social perception of the love between two men is more complex. Even though there is no open condemnation,68 the physical relationship develops in a climate of relative shame. The two heroes on the island of Phtia hide from Chiron and most importantly from Thetis. After their first night together, described in a very general and allusive manner, the two teenagers wonder how they would feel if their parents and Chiron were angry with them: “He studied me a moment. ‘Do you care if they are angry?’ 64  “It was all about gold and all knew it, for no one cared a fig about aging Helen”, ibid., 131. 65  As says Odysseus to Briseis once Chriseis is gone: “You are a handsome woman, but I see that you are, may I say kindly, no longer in the precise bloom of youth”, ibid., 136. 66  B. Fone also develops quite romantic, if not ‘sugary’, descriptions like this love scene with charioteer Mecisteus: “I am flying; we two fly together; together we rise above the world and together unite and like a thousand suns we burst into glorious light. There is music: brilliant, insistent, a triumphant fanfare as we descend and fall and fall and fall into each other’s arms”, ibid., 170. 67  When Antilochus is sent for an embassy to Achilles, along with Ajax and Odysseus: “I watched this all too domestic scene with envy in my heart. Just like an old married couple, I thought. I wanted that”, ibid., 186. 68  There is one joke by Diomedes when Achilles is sent by Patroclus to save a maximum of captive girls: “I sent Achilles out to ask for them, to seek as many as he could, and the men teased him about his voraciousness, his endless priapism. ‘Didn’t know you liked girls’, Diomedes joked”, Miller (2011) 219.

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Yes. I would be horrified to find Chiron upset with me. Disapproval has always burrowed deep in me.”69 The only characters to react to the relationship between the two are women: Thetis, who has always hated Patroclus and knows what role he will play in her son’s death at Troy;70 Deidamia, who is jealous and extremely hurt when re­ jected by Achilles; and Briseis, who understands, but would like to find a place in Patroclus’ heart. These negative reactions are never motivated by feelings of social condemnation of homosexuality, but rather by jealousy, in particular in the case of Thetis, who is portrayed as a very possessive mother.71 Miller plays in a subtle way on this motive to justify the guilt and embarrassment of the heroes with which modern young readers could identify themselves without introducing the anachronistic notion of homophobia in a universe where the notion of homosexuality does not exist. In the same way, there is no general homoerotic seduction as there is in Fone’s book. Achilles is totally faithful to Patroclus and has no desire to seduce others. It even seems that Miller insists on removing other possibilities known from antiquity, for Achilles kills Troilus in front of Troy as well as Penthesilea, even though, for a second, he had hoped to be killed by her.72 Even the story of Deidamia, important as it is, since she will bear Achilles’ son,73 is told with an interesting twist. Achilles gives Patroclus embarrassed description of their sexual intercourse: He floundered as he tried to describe the heavy, thick smell, the wetness between her legs. ‘Greasy’ he said, ‘like oil’ … ‘I cannot remember, really. It was dark, and I could not see. I wanted it to be over’. He stroked my cheek. ‘I missed you’ .74

69  Miller (2011) 98. 70  The two boys are relieved when they learn that she cannot see them in the mount Pelion (93), so they feel free to go further. 71  Thetis is not either in favour of Deidamia which she qualifies as “poor and ordinary, an expedient only”, ibid., 125. 72  Ibid., 335: “He makes a sound of grief. He had hoped, because she has killed so many. Because from her horse she seemed so like him … But she is not”. There is here no erotic connotation to the fight. 73  In the Iliad, there is no episode on the island since the theme of the hero dressed as a girl does not fit the epic code. Thus Achilles first conquers Scyros and then leaves for Aulis, Il. 9. 668. 74  Miller (2011) 138–139.

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The disgust Achilles feels for the body of the woman contrasts strongly with Patroclus’ feelings when Deidamia forces him to have sex with her, in revenge for the humiliation that Achilles’ indifference has caused her: I will not say I was not aroused. A slow climbing tension moved through me. It was a strange drowsy feeling, so different from my sharp sure de­ sires from Achilles.75 In the same way, the strong bond with Briseis, to whom he teaches Greek lan­ guage and medical science, leads her to propose to him that they have a child together, in what looks very like a very modern family: “I know that you love him’ she said, hesitating a little before each word. ‘I know. But I thought that— some men have wives and lovers both’ ”. A little later she asks him “Do you not ever want children”.76 Patroclus is moved, even though the thought of Achilles stops him: ‘If you wanted it, it would be all right’. Each word was carefully placed; he was trying to be fair. I thought of the dark-haired child again. I thought of Achilles. ‘It is all right now’. I said. The relief on his face filled me with sweetness.77 This relationship with Briseis, which does not seem completely impossible to Patroclus, should be understood as a sign of his character, which is presented as a complete opposite to that of Achilles. Patroclus is no natural warrior and stands always on the side-lines of life. It is his love for Achilles that allows him to stay on the battlefield, for here there is no erotic value to violence.78 Indeed, Patroclus actually hates warfare since it brings back memories of the child he killed by mistake. He is the only one to learn medicine, and becomes a doctor for the whole camp, in contradiction of the ancient tradition whereby Achilles possesses this skill. Above all, he is capable of bonding with others, and creates

75  Miller (2011) 140. 76  Ibid., 255–256. 77  Ibid., 256. 78  “Again and again I saw his wrist twist, exposing his pale underside, those flute-like bones thrusting elegantly forward. (…) I could not even see the ugliness of the deaths anymore, the brains, the shattered bones that later I would wash from my skin and hair. All I saw was his beauty, his singing limbs, the quick flickering of his feet”, Ibid., 227.

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a life with the captives when Achilles is on the battle field, while Achilles re­ mains always estranged.79 As stated above, Miller does not play on any ‘gay code’, either openly or by suggestion. When she recreates the scene of Achilles dressed as a girl in Scyros, taken from Statius’ Achilleid, there is no irony, no Butlerian play on the gender issue, but just a very bland retelling of the story, even when Achilles justifies the presence of Patroclus to King Lycomedes by saying “he is my husband”. In her description of physical love, she remains very general and describes what could be an erotic intimacy between two individuals.80 Even the use of the motive of the figs that first appear as a courting gift, then as a love gift81 carries a universal meaning as the fig can refer in antiquity both to male and female genitals.82 The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is never defined in itself, although there are no other such couples mentioned in the novel. While Fone’s hero underlines several times the cultural value of the pederastic couple, only one episode in Miller’s book presents the couple, in a rather naïve manner, as the only example of warriors who do not display violence against women.83 Miller places far more emphasis on how much love has changed and humanized Achilles, whereas his son, Pyrrhus, is shown as a brutal macho. When told that Achilles’ companion will be buried with his father, Pyrrhus cannot understand the depth of their relationship.84

79  “it was easy to stay with them long and late, until I heard the creaking of the chariot, and the distant banging of bronze, and returned to greet my Achilles.”, Miller (2011) 220. This pair is not a “sort of self-sufficient microcosmic alternative to the macrocosm of the Greek army”, Fantuzzi (2012) 208, like in Iliad 9, as only Patroclus can open up to somebody else than Achilles. 80  By the use of expressions like “the place of his pleasure” which could fit man or woman. 81  Miller (2011) 27 and 91. 82  See Irini-Despina Papaikonomou and Stéphanie Huysecom-Haxhi, “Du placenta aux figues sèches: mobilier funéraire et votif à Thasos”, Kernos, 22 (2009), put on line on 26th october 2012. URL : http://kernos.revues.org/1779; DOI: 10.4000/kernos.1779. 83  First, their relationship is a protection for her as she doesn’t have to fear to be raped: “I saw the fear in her eyes, of rape and worse. I could not bear it. There was only one thing I could think of. I turned to Achilles and seized the front of his tunic. I kissed him”, Miller (2011) 216. 84  “A slave has no place in his master’s tomb. If the ashes are together, it cannot be un­ done, but I will not allow my father’s fame to be diminished. The monument is for him, alone”, ibid., 341.

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5 Conclusion Miller and Fone both engage with the two classical traditions of Achilles as a great warrior and a supreme lover, but react to these traditions in very differ­ ent ways. Fone describes Achilles as an object of fascination and mixes the two themes by assigning an erotic value to violence. Miller focuses rather on the personality of Patroclus and his world outside the war, which could have been an escape for Achilles from his brutal destiny, had he not been an epic character. Both the books end with the narrative of their common burial. In Miller’s version, Patroclus, by singing this song of Achilles, earns the right to have a name for himself and thus becomes the main character of the novel, subvert­ ing the martial values of the epic and giving space to the expression of person­ al feelings. In Fone’s book, the three heroes are buried together as the fictional historian writes: “There, Achilles lies with Patroclus and Antilochus, who loved him”.85  Fone thus alters the Odyssey’s version of events, in which Antilochus’ bones are kept in the same tomb, but separately from the urn that contains the remains of Patroclus and Achilles. This conclusion is representative of the message of the whole book, in which Antilochus struggles to find a place be­ tween the two, and where the Iliadic war narrative is slightly forcedly moulded into a gay romance novel. Much more interesting are the ethical dimension of his book as an assertion of the existence of a gay culture and the transmedial aspect of his description of Achilles, influenced by both the epic and the filmic heritage, which is such an essential element in the construction of the image of the ancient world in contemporary culture. These novels are a very good example of the dynamic of rewriting the an­ cient world in popular culture. Even though written by scholars informed of the deep and complex interpretative tradition about the hero, they engage vividly with the theme, without showing a paralyzing respect to the Homeric masterpiece, and play fully with the popular literature codes. They combine the antic imitatio/aemulatio dynamic with the modern means of mass distri­ bution and keep this heritage alive. Bibliography Compère, Daniel, Les Romans populaires (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012). Delarue, Fernand, “Le Romanesque dans l’Achilléide de Stace”, Ars Scribendi, 3 http:// ars-scribendi.ens-lyon.fr/spip.php?article10. 85  Fone (2013) 222.

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Delarue, Fernand, Stace, poète épique: originalité et coherence (Louvain-Paris: Peeters, 2000). Delecroix, Vincent, Tombeau d’Achille (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). Dover, Kenneth J., Greek homosexuality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). Eribon, Didier, Réflexions sur la question gay (Paris: Champs Essais, Flammarion, 1996). Fantuzzi, Marco, Achilles in Love, Intertextual Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Ficat, Charles, La colère d’Achille (Paris: Bartillat, 2006). Fone, Bryne Hidden Heritage. History and the Gay Imagination. An anthology (New York: Advocation Pub, 1980). Fone, Bryne, Masculine landscapes: Walt Whitman and the homoerotic text (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992). Fone, Bryne, Homophobia, a history (New York, Metropolitan Books, 2000). Foucault, Michel, Histoire de la sexualité. La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). Halperin, David, One hundred years of homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1989). Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse (eds.), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Compagny, Inc, 2006). Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse (eds.), The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (Iowa City: University of Iowa City Press, 2014). King, Katherin C., Achilles. Paradigms of the War hero from Homer to the Middle Ages (Bekerley: University of California Press, 1987). Krass, Andreas, “Over His Dead Body: Male Friendship in Homer’s Iliad and Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004)”, in Almut-Barbara Enger and Jon Solomon (eds.), Ancient Worlds in Film and Television. Gender and Politics (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2013) 153–73. Mazaleigue-Labaste, Julie, “De l’amour socratique à l’homosexualité grecque”, Romantisme 19 (2013) 35–46. Myrsiades, Kostas (ed.), Reading Homer: Film and Text (Madison/Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009). Nagy, Gregory, Poetry as performance : Homer and beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Ogden, Daniel, “Homosexuality and Warfare in Ancient Greece”, in Alan B. Lloyd (ed.) Battle in Antiquity (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2009) 123–125. Pantelis, Michelakis, Achilles in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Papaikonomou, Irini-Despina and Stéphanie Huysecom-Haxhi, “Du placenta aux figues sèches: mobilier funéraire et votif à Thasos”, Kernos, 22 (2009), put on line on 26th october 2012. URL: http://kernos.revues.org/1779; DOI: 10.4000/kernos.1779. Paul, Joanna, Film and the Classical Epic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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Pirro, Robert C., “Homer’s lies, Brad Pitt’s thighs” in Michael G. Cornelius (ed.), Of Muscles and Men: Essays on the Sword and Sandal Film (Jefferson-London: Mc Farland &Co Inc, 2011) 104–123. Radt, Stefan, (ed.), Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (vol. 3) (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009). Richeux, Marie, Achille (Paris: Sabine Wespieser éditeur, 2015). Ripoll, François and Jean Soubiran (trans. and intro), Statius, Achilléide (Louvain-Paris: Peeters, 2008). Sergent, Bernard, Homosexualité et initiation chez les peuples indo-européens (Paris: Payot, 1996). Winkler, Martin M., Troy: From Homer’s Iliad to Hollywood Epic (Hoboken, N.J.: WileyBlackwell, 2006). Winkler, Martin M., (ed.), Return to Troy, New Essays on the Hollywood Epic (LeidenBoston: Brill, 2015).

CHAPTER 8

“Home Is Behind, the World Ahead”: Reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit as a Story of Xenia or Homeric Hospitality Hamish Williams J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit1 fits comfortably into the modern genre of fantasy literature; this is a story about a metre high, hairy-footed creature called a hobbit, who teams up with a group of quarrelsome dwarves and a staff-wielding wizard in order to slay a dragon, get some treasure—and slay a few thousand goblins on the way. The fantastic subject matter of the novel, however, should not blind us to those more prosaic, quotidian aspects which render the work relevant to both reader and critic: Throughout the novel, Tolkien has introduced elements of polite and impolite behaviour assumed to be proper or improper by the narrator and the characters, and thus by the reader.2 But to label The Hobbit a ‘tale of manners’ or ‘proper behaviour’ is perhaps not quite specific enough; in Tolkien’s work, we are dealing with prescribed social conduct which occurs in a defined space between a host and a guest, the owner of a home and its visitor, and which, in English, is called ‘hospitality’. Despite my employment of a modern English term, along with its related cultural connotations, this chapter will reflect how Tolkien’s understanding and implementation of this social phenomenon lies in an Ancient Greek, particularly Homeric, appreciation of the relationship between a guest and a host, known as xenia. Although Tolkien earned his bread and butter as a scholar of Old English, much of his formative education, at least up until the conclusion of his undergraduate studies, was based in a rigorous training in classical philology.3 We 1  John R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: or There and Back Again (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997). 2  David Stevens & Carol D. Stevens, C.D., “The Hobbit”, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2008) 20. 3  Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: a Biography (London: Harper Collins, 2002) 90.

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know that the young Tolkien displayed an early proficiency in and affinity for Latin, in which he was instructed by his mother from a young age,4 and that this was soon accompanied by Ancient Greek lessons at school, in which he excelled;5 of his affinity for the Hellenic language Tolkien later wrote: The fluidity of Greek, punctuated by hardness, and with its surface glitter captivated me. But part of the attraction was antiquity and alien remoteness … it did not touch home.6 More specifically, Tolkien was instructed in Homeric Greek in school;7 and of the Ancient Greek bard(s), the English novelist would later write, “I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer”.8 This is no small praise for a writer to make, and we may pause to reflect just how much this first literary love shaped Tolkien’s later storytelling exploits. Eaton remarks that, although there are certain mythological parallels in characters as well as episodic similarities between the worlds of Tolkien and Homer, any direct correspondences are purely accidental and on account of their drawing from a shared mythic pool.9 I contend, to the contrary, that there is one marked influence of Homer’s Odyssey in Tolkien’s first novel, The Hobbit—and this lies not in any sustained character depiction, plot thread or thematic correspondence but in the social phenomenon of hospitality. Xenia, or hospitality,10 is central to the story of the Odyssey.11 Odysseus’ quest is a nostos, a voyage home to Ithaca after the sacking and destruction of Troy; the hero’s home, however, is not being respected: an unruly mob of men have taken advantage of his decade-long absence by overrunning his property, 4 5 6 7

  Ibid., 38.   Ibid., 45.   Ibid., 45–46.   Dustin Eaton, “Homer”, in Michael D.C. Drout (ed.), J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment (New York: Routledge, 2007) 285. 8   John R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (London: Harper Collins, 2006) 172. 9   Eaton (2007) 284–285. 10  ‘Hospitality’ is perhaps an insufficient translation of the Greek term, which entails a strong religious element (Hom. Od. 9.266–271), not necessarily present in contemporary associations of the English word, although, as I shall discuss (cf. pages 25–28), it is relevant to Tolkien’s representation of hospitality. 11  For a systematic recent monograph on hospitality in the Odyssey, cf. Steve Reece, The Stranger’s Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993).

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eating his livestock, wooing his wife, Penelope, threatening to kill his son, Telemachus, and sleeping with his household maids. In short, his rights as the host of his home are being blatantly violated. The execution of the suitors at the conclusion of the epic is justified on account of their disregard for xenia, for the proper, respectful relation between host and guest.12 Hospitality is not only important to the main thread of the plot, but throughout the Odyssey scenes of xenia are omnipresent. Telemachus is kindly entertained in the homes of Nestor and Menelaus in his eagerness to gain news about his missing father; Odysseus washes up shipwrecked on the shores of Scheria and is forced to seek xenia from the somewhat xenophobic Phaeacians who dwell;13 in the fantastic stories which Odysseus narrates to these maritime people, commonly known as the Apologue, hospitality is again a central phenomenon as the Ithacan hero describes his receptions in lands of giants, monsters and witches;14 Odysseus is hosted by the swine-herder, Eumaeus, in his modest pastoral accommodation when the hero returns to Ithaca; and, finally, in the guise of a beggar, Odysseus seeks hospitality from the suitors as false ‘hosts’ in his own home. This analysis will examine how Tolkien’s The Hobbit can be read as a story of Homeric hospitality or xenia. The value of such a comparative interpretation will be threefold. Firstly, in terms of the novel’s didactic status as a story of manners, I shall contend that Tolkien evaluates proper and improper hospitality largely in accordance with that of the Homeric epic. In other words, Tolkien’s models for what comprises good and bad hosts can be located in the Odyssey. Secondly, this analysis will provide a new structural framework from which to read and understand the novel’s quest, based on a three-part development in hospitality, which I shall also locate in the Odyssey. Thirdly, by comparing magical elements across both stories, it will be argued that The Hobbit presents hospitality as an interaction governed by a supernatural, ultimately divine guidance, and which thus imparts a strong ethical prescription upon the reader. The first host we come across in The Hobbit is Bilbo Baggins. Home for the diminutive character “means comfort”.15 Bag End is situated in an idyllic 12  Harry L. Levy, “The Odyssean Suitors and the Host-Guest Relationship”, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 94 (1963) 150–152. 13   Cf. Glenn W. Most, “The Structure and Function of Odysseus’ Apologoi”, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 119 (1989) 15–30; Reece (1993) 101–121; Gilbert P. Rose, “The Unfriendly Phaeacians”, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 100 (1969) 387–406. 14  Most (1989) 25, Reece (1993) 123–124. 15  Tolkien (1997) 1.

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landscape, fixed snuggly within a hill looking over a garden, a meadow, and a river; the interior of the house has been carpeted and upholstered to make it a very “comfortable tunnel”;16 the dwelling is single-storied to avoid the hobbit having to exert himself too much in, for example, going up a flight of stairs; there are whole rooms designated as walk-in closets; and this is not to mention Bilbo’s supplies of food in his pantry, which, as later events demonstrate, are more than sufficient for a solitary hobbit’s needs. And when it comes to Bilbo’s position as a host, we are told initially by the narrator that he “was fond of visitors” (1).17 This characteristically benevolent reception of guests seems to be upheld when we first witness Bilbo in action, smoking a pipe18 and greeting an old man who has walked up to his front door: “Good morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green.19 The hobbit’s reaction to the ‘stranger’20 is manifestly welcoming in his ebullient address and, moreover, the vibrant natural environment seems aptly to personify his amiable mood. Gandalf (that is who the old man happens to be) at once tries to unsettle the ‘halfling’ by employing a riddled greeting, providing four different ways in which the address could be interpreted. Bilbo doesn’t take the wizard’s wordplay amiss, but instead offers him his hospitality: a seat and a smoke of his own pipe. The hobbit asserts his authority as host by declaring the removal from temporal restrictions which his comfortable existence affords him and by inviting his guest to share in this: “There’s no hurry, we have all day before us!”21 Gandalf’s rebuke as a guest is immediate, declaring that he “has no time to blow smoke-rings”22 and then informing Bilbo that he is looking for someone to go with him on an adventure. The hobbit’s response is emphatic, first indicating that the wizard is not in the right country for adventure-seekers, then trying to ignore his guest altogether, and finally flatly refusing Gandalf (who 16  Ibid. 17  Ibid. 18  A further token of Bilbo’s comfortable existence. 19  Tolkien (1997) 3. 20  Bilbo has met Gandalf before, though this is but a distant memory at the start of the novel. 21  Tolkien (1997) 4. 22  Ibid., 4.

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has by now announced his identity) the immediate hospitality of his home by shutting his door in the face of the wizard.23 He even scolds himself for having invited the wizard the following day for tea, which was done partly as a dismissive nicety, not being able to be entirely rude to his guest, and partly on account of the powerful status of the old man. Bilbo’s annoyance with Gandalf and his marked denial of a hospitality which he is first heralded for does not lie in any particular dislike of the wizard himself—in a moment of romantic freedom the hobbit fondly recalls the magical fireworks which the old man is capable of producing—but rather in what the wizard represents, which is a disruption to his comfort in the form of adventure. Tolkien again marks out this pivotal word in Bilbo’s panicked rejection of Gandalf’s quest for an adventurer— “[I] have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things!”24— and in the narrator’s observations of Bilbo’s reactions when the hobbit notices that the wizard has not got the hint and departed—“Bilbo got quite uncomfortable and even a little cross”.25 This threat of a disruption to a host’s comfort through the demands of a guest can be aptly compared to the Phaeacian sequence of the Odyssey. The Phaeacians experience a level of comfort which reflects Bilbo’s in three respects: abundance of food, quality of residence, and lack of labour. Much of their easy existence is manifested through a plentiful supply of food: this is noteworthy in their grand feasting in which even the gods join,26 but also in the description of King Alcinous’ garden,27 a locus amoenus, where agricultural production is marked out by its variety and its eternal budding, irrespective of the natural seasons.28 The Phaeacians’ sense of comfort is also indicated by the opulence of the architecture in Scheria, in particular the splendour of the royal palace is a sight to behold, where gold, silver, and bronze abound over walls, doors, and statues.29 And, lastly, just as Bilbo is marked out by his

23  Ibid., 6. 24  Ibid., 4. 25  Ibid., 4. 26  Hom. Od. 7.203. 27  Hom. Od. 7.114–126. 28  Irene J.F. De Jong, A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 176; Carol Dougherty, The Raft of Odysseus: the Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 88–89; Anthony T. Edwards, “Homer’s Ethical Geography: Country and City in the Odyssey”, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 123 (1993) 47–48. 29  Hom. Od. 7.84–97.

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free recourse to leisure time,30 so equally the Phaeacians are no labourers and are most frequently viewed undertaking leisure activities, feasting, dancing or playing sport, as we see throughout Book 8.31 The Phaeacians’ reception of Odysseus is not dissimilar to Bilbo’s initial offer of hospitality to Gandalf in the form of pipe and relaxation, in that they are more than ready to offer xenia in their own terms and which complies with their comfortable existence: they offer the hero plentiful feasts, invite him to take part in sports, provide entertainment of song and dance, and the king even suggests marriage to his daughter; and yet the hospitality, the gifts of the guest or xeinēion, which the hero really needs and demands—namely, to be transported home to Ithaca32—are not so quickly attained. The Phaeacians treat Odysseus’ requests with no great urgency and his stay in Scheria is unnecessarily protracted during the Phaeacian festivities;33 in fact, Odysseus has to ask on no less than three occasions to be sent home.34 The time-wasting of the easy-going Phaeacians matches Bilbo’s initial invitation to Gandalf to throw away the hours with him, smoking on his porch. And the motivation behind their indefinite deferral is also similar to Bilbo’s. As hosts, the Phaeacians are fearful that their experience of home might be threatened by giving Odysseus the xenia he demands; for Poseidon, the patron god of these people, had warned them against offering excessive transport to foreigners, that such an act could result in his displeasure and punishment— namely, the physical isolation of their city from the outside world.35 The Phaeacians are reluctant to immediately help Odysseus because it might alter their experience of home as a place of comfortable prosperity; to be specific, such a geographic seclusion would affect the maritime exploration and trade36 which lies at the centre of Phaeacian economic and public life.37 Critics have suggested Poseidon’s threat plays a dominant role in the initial ambivalent reaction of the Phaeacians towards Odysseus.38 To return to The Hobbit, Bilbo 30  We first witness Bilbo smoking his pipe at his doorway and claiming to his guest that he has all the time in the world. 31  Hom. Od. 8.246–249. 32  Hom. Od. 7.151–152, Rose (1969) 398. 33  Most (1989) 29. 34  Ibid., 28. 35  Specifically, Poseidon would ‘bury their city under a mountain’ (Hom. Od. 8.569). 36  Hom. Od. 8.557–563. 37  Hom. Od. 6.266–272. In the passage cited, the temple of Poseidon lies at centre of this market where a hive of activity occurs. 38  Rose (1969) 392; Charles Segal, “Divine Justice in the Odyssey: Poseidon, Cyclops, and Helios”, American Journal of Philology 113.4 (1992) 499.

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is terrified to go on an adventure, even though, like the Phaeacians’ enthusiasm for nautical voyages, there is the ‘Tookish’39 side to him which encourages him to partake in adventures,40 because he fears that such an endeavour would irreparably alter his conception of home: “[Adventures] Make you late for dinner!”.41 In both of these stories the hosts are guilty of what Jacques Derrida considers a particularly hostile approach to hospitality in the form of integration.42 To paraphrase, hospitality assumes a relationship between a ‘host’ and a ‘guest’, by definition; however when the host tries to assimilate the guest, to force him into changing such that he would be more compliant with the host’s comfort, he then ceases to be a ‘guest’ or ‘foreigner’43 by definition. His essential ‘otherness’ is being eroded; he is forced to ‘host-ify’. The Phaeacians are guilty of this by turning Odysseus into a prospective suitor: by encouraging him to compete with other young Phaeacian men and to marry into their clan, ultimately becoming one of them, no longer a mere ‘guest’.44 Bilbo Baggins demonstrates such a rudeness by not ever enquiring of his guest’s particular needs during the entirety of their interaction; any problematic demands the guest may have are deliberately passed over and he is encouraged to becoming a nameless ‘second’ host, the mirror image of Bilbo, sitting on the front porch and smoking a pipe. Here can be observed the perceptiveness of Gandalf’s cunning interpretation of the host’s “Good morning”,45 where the address seems to involve a prescriptive element—Bilbo’s guests better not have a bad morning, not if they expect to be welcomed in his home. As a host, therefore, Bilbo Baggins demonstrates points of contact with the Homeric Phaeacians: firstly, in his experience of home as a place of personal comfort, involving bounteous food, leisure, and a munificent environment; secondly, in his desire for guests to integrate into this comfort, thus supressing any demands of hospitality which may upset this easy attitude; and, lastly, when it is clear that a demand is being made to the contrary, in trying to waste 39  ‘Took’ is Bilbo’s mother’s maiden name; his father was of course a ‘Baggins’. Both have died at the start of the story. 40  Jay Ruud, Critical Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien: a Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts On File, Inc, 2011) 111. 41  Tolkien (1997) 4. 42  Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) 16. 43  In Greek, the word xeinos can denote a ‘guest’ or a ‘foreigner’, and often both at the same time. 44  Nicolas P. Gross, “Nausicaa: a Feminine Threat”, Classical World 69.5 (1976) 315. 45  Tolkien (1997) 3.

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as much time as possible to avoid having to help his guest.46 Bilbo and the Phaeacians, nevertheless, are essentially benevolent, albeit reluctant, hosts, and time-wasting is certainly a far less heinous crime than many which are revealed by inimical hosts through the respective adventures. Interestingly, in both stories it takes a certain ‘magical’ inducement to render the unenthusiastic hosts more compliant to their guests’ requests. In The Hobbit, Gandalf is a wizard, a magician by definition, and his bag of tricks include both artifice (talking in riddles) and real physical magic (inscribing a magical sign on the door of Bag End) to help overcome Bilbo’s reluctance. Indeed, even the name “Gandalf”47 seems to have an otherworldly effect on the hobbit,48 in automatically triggering his Tookish character, his desire for adventure and fun over his more bourgeois ‘Baggins’ persona. Similarly, it can be remarked that Odysseus’ storytelling in Books 9 to 12 of the epic has a quite magical effect on his listening audience: when there is a pause in the Apologue in Book 11, the Phaeacian listeners seem entirely spell-bound; the Homeric narrator uses the term “κηληθμῷ”,49 which denotes a kind of enchantment, to describe the silence which pervades the Scherian court. But this verbal magic of Odysseus is not merely a literary metaphor; like Gandalf’s innate wizardry, the supernatural or magical effect of a storyteller’s art is accounted for in the Odyssey by the close connection between the inspired bard and the divine muses.50 Thus while artifice, particularly with regards to the use of words and storytelling, might be thought of as ‘magical’ in a purely figurative sense in both stories, it is, nevertheless, given a firm basis 46  (1) Bilbo’s time-wasting is so severe that he wakes up late the morning after Gandalf and the dwarves have left and almost misses his chance to partake in the quest. (2) It must be admitted, with regard to the Phaeacian reception scene, that Odysseus is also responsible to a degree for these delays in Scheria, cf. Pietro Pucci, The Song of the Sirens: Essays on Homer (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, INC, 1998) 113–115, 147; Karl Reinhardt, “The Adventures in the Odyssey”, in Seth L. Schein (ed.), Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretative Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 124–125. 47  Tolkien (1997) 6. 48  Both Odysseus and Gandalf employ their names as powerful tokens of their fame and identity, and use this as leverage to attain the hospitality they demand. For the importance of Odysseus’ announcement of his name, cf. George E. Dimock, “The Name of Odysseus”, The Hudson Review 9.1 (1956) 52–70; Alice Webber, “The Hero Tells His Name: Formula and Variation in the Phaeacian Episode of the Odyssey”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 119 (1989) 1–13. 49  Hom. Od. 11.334. 50   Cf. William W. Minton, “Homer’s Invocations of the Muses: Traditional Patterns”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 91 (1960) 292.

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or link to the supernatural in being ascribed to a wizard and a bard as its chief practitioners. Furthermore, Odysseus’ penchant for trickery in general, his skill in mētis (‘cunning’ or ‘shrewdness’) and dolos (‘tricks’ or ‘stratagems’),51 is given another supernatural or divine association through the praise of Athena, who claims that the hero’s prowess in tricks would even surpass those of a god,52 not insignificant praise, considering that Athena herself is a goddess known for her many wiles.53 It is Odysseus’ capacity to excel in dolos which ensures so close a tie with a goddess. I shall examine elsewhere examples where Gandalf’s (and, later, his protégé, Bilbo’s) two brands of ‘magic’—real wizardry as well as clever tricks—and Odysseus’ doloi are used to negotiate inhospitable homes. The result of Gandalf’s magical involvement is Bilbo’s gradual transformation into a host who is compliant to the demands of his guests, even thirteen rather uncouth, nomadic dwarves; thus he yields to his guests’ invitation to join their quest as a ‘burglar’, though he still expresses considerable reservation in doing so. This reticence will be worn down54 as the adventure ensues. For the dwarves’ part, although they display appropriate decorum in announcing their names as guests (a formality which Bilbo occasionally neglects) and pledging the ‘service’ which they owe to Bilbo as their host,55 they are far from behaving as ideal guests. As McNulty recognizes,56 in addition to threatening the identity of the guest, improper hospitality also poses a risk to the host in becoming homeless, in losing sovereignty of the home. Bilbo begins to fear such a scenario through the excessive feasting of the visiting company and his own practical transformation into a waiting servant, though the dwarves soon allay his anxieties by ridiculing their supposed physical destruction of his home through a song:

51   Cf. Pietro Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos: Intertextual Readings in the Odyssey and the Iliad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 52  Hom. Od. 13.291–293. 53  Hom. Od. 13.298–299; Pucci (1987) 16, 22. 54  His affinity for the comforts of his home can be viewed during his adventures; on no less than eleven occasions Bilbo expresses to himself or to others the desire to be back in his comfortable home, cf. Stevens & Stevens (2008) 21. 55  In this respect, The Hobbit differs from the Odyssey, where the custom of hospitality requires that a guest’s name is given only after he has been fed, and not upon arriving at the threshold, which is the case in The Hobbit, cf. Reece (1993) 6–7. 56  Tracy McNulty, The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) xv.

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Chip the glasses and crack the plates! Blunt the knives and bend the forks! That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates Smash the bottles and burn the corks!57 Although he might not be in danger of becoming physically robbed of the control of his home, the hobbit is very much in danger of being labelled as an ineffective, impotent host through his failure to live up to his newly-acquired status as ‘professional burglar’. At least two of the dwarves treat Bilbo with a certain degree of contempt: first Gloin implies that the hobbit cannot claim suitability for the job on account of his ancient family history;58 and secondly, Thorin Oakenshield, the leader of the company of dwarves, is openly scornful of Bilbo’s abilities: Very well then,’ said Thorin, ‘supposing the burglar-expert gives us some ideas or suggestions.’ He turned with mock-politeness to Bilbo.59 There is a disparity between the initial profession of politeness which the dwarves offer upon entering Bilbo’s home, and the erosion of this decorum as they begin to question the sovereignty of the host. Bilbo as a host is forced to respond to this assault upon his fictitious status as a robber and accordingly falls into Gandalf’s trap of accepting his place in the quest. Incidentally, it is only again through the strong intervention of the wizard that a burgeoning disrespect for the host of Bag End is quashed before a great rift develops between host and guests: Just let any one say I chose the wrong man or the wrong house, and you can stop at thirteen60 and have all the bad luck you like, or go back to digging coal.61 The suitors display a similar rudeness to Telemachus in the Odyssey. Comparisons between the situations of Telemachus and Bilbo are several: both 57  Tolkien (1997) 12. 58  Ibid., 18. 59  Ibid., 21. 60  The superstition of avoiding an unlucky number plays a role in ensuring proper hospitality is maintained. 61  Tolkien (1997) 18.

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are youthful or otherwise represented as inexperienced;62 they are deprived of their fathers, the appropriate models for authority as host; they fail to assert the authority of host themselves initially; and they are compelled by supernatural instigation—divine or magical, Athena and Gandalf respectively—to leave their homes and to go on journeys of maturation,63 a necessary educational introduction to hospitality. In terms of the shortcomings of the dwarves and suitors to xenia, the latter threaten to eat Telemachus out of house and home (representing Bilbo’s initial misguided fear of the dwarves) through their excessive consumption of livestock which does not belong to them.64 And just as is evident in some of the dwarves’ comments, the suitors, especially Antinous, disparage the authority of Telemachus as master of his oikos when the young host has called an assembly in Book 2, refusing to leave his property.65 It might be argued that the dwarves are far more amicable in their treatment of Bilbo than the suitors are to Telemachus, whom they even scheme to kill at one stage in the poem. But the ‘workable’ relationship between the dwarves and Bilbo is in no small degree attributable to the machinations of Gandalf, who frequently acts as a moderator to feuds between the two parties, until Bilbo has earned sufficient respect for the wizard’s presence to no longer be necessary. Secondly, there is a strong point of comparison between the dwarves and the suitors in that both are set upon claiming a home as theirs,66 and will do whatever it takes to achieve this: while in the case of the Odyssey this will entail killing Telemachus, it should be observed that the dwarves show no ethical objections against risking Bilbo’s life for the sake of achieving their ends, which they do both in the case of the trolls and of Smaug—they even suggest leaving him for dead after their escape from the Misty Mountains.

62  There are puerile aspects to Bilbo’s character: he displays a typically boyish fondness, over-indulgence, and possessiveness towards food; he fears leaving the safety and comfort of his ‘womb-like’ hobbit hole, in which he has spent his entire life (Ruud (2011) 111); his unchallenged, unremarked bachelorhood points to a childlike innocence towards sexuality; and, in case we were in any doubt, at one notable point in the underground escape from the goblins, the helpless hobbit is even carried on the shoulders of one of the dwarves, thus acting like a surrogate father (Ruud (2011) 115). 63  William H. Green, “Bilbo’s Adventures in Wilderland”, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2008) 30. 64   Cf. Hom. Od. 2.138–145, Hom. Od. 11.116; Egbert J. Bakker, The Meaning of Meat and the Structure of the Odyssey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 45. 65  Hom. Od. 2.85–128. 66  In fairness to the former party, it had been taken away from them through violence.

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In short, the expediency which the dwarves exhibit in trying to reclaim a home, to themselves once again be hosts, demonstrates a disposable ethics as homeless guests not unlike that of the suitors. Thirdly, I shall discuss how the dwarves later show a completely disrespectful attitude towards hospitality as hosts when I examine the final section of The Hobbit, the return to the Lonely Mountain, and how this can be compared to the suitors as hosts in their reception of Odysseus. The central journey of The Hobbit, after the company of fifteen depart from Bag End and before they arrive at Erebor,67 provides several different representations of hospitality—some malevolent, some ambiguous, some benevolent—when the travellers seek the reception of various hosts. They soon accidently run into a trio of anthropophagous trolls, whose cave-home reveals several precious treasures. Following this the travellers take a brief respite in the aptly-named “Last Homely House”68 of the half-elf Elrond before they embark on a journey over the Misty Mountains, entering yet another cave, the “Front Porch”69 of the goblins who live in a web of interconnected tunnels within the mountains. The fifteen companions are rescued from the perils of goblins and ‘wargs’, or evil wolves, by giant eagles, taking them to their eyrie, the “Great Shelf”.70 The shape-shifter Beorn also offers his home as a refuge to the travellers before they voyage into Mirkwood, a forest in which they are imprisoned in the “great cave”71 of the king of the woodland elves. Upon escaping from the elves, the fourteen companions (minus Gandalf) make their way into the hall of The Master of Laketown, a city of men who live near the Lonely Mountain. Within these adventures, the first ‘hosts’72 encountered are three anthropophagous trolls. Bilbo is sent ahead by the dwarves to investigate a distant light in the forest—the company is hungry and in need of food and shelter, in short hospitality. He finds a fire and a make-shift kitchen, surrounded by the three giants. Bilbo realizes the futility of the mission and, before returning to the dwarves, endeavours to steal something from the trolls; he fails, is 67  That is, ‘The Lonely Mountain’. 68  Tolkien (1997) 44. 69  Ibid., 59. 70  Ibid., 104. 71  Ibid., 157. 72  Theirs is a home in a most primitive sense. Although the company strictly does not meet the trolls in their cave, the campsite where the three giants are encountered seems to constitute an ad hoc kitchen for them and can thus be thought of as an extension or part of their greater home.

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caught, and so too are the dwarves gradually. They are all, with the exception of Gandalf who went missing at the start of the scene, under threat of being turned into food, before the wizard returns timeously and, through an act of verbal trickery, delays the trolls sufficiently until sunrise, whereby they turn into stone (the downside of being a troll). Finally, the rescued company discovers the cave-dwelling of the trolls, and some valuable booty, including two antique Elven swords which Gandalf and Thorin appropriate. There are several points of comparison between this episode and the Polyphemus narrative in Book 9 of the Odyssey.73 The protagonists are seeking out some form of hospitality, food or shelter, after they have suffered a trauma in their journeys: Odysseus has lost many of his men in a battle with the Cicones, while the dwarves have lost a pony and a large part of their provisions with it. The dwarves and Odysseus’ men share the ignominy of being treated as food by the giants, though in The Hobbit, a work aimed at a younger audience,74 there is no anthropophagy, only teasing allusions to such a horrendous act.75 The defeat of the monsters is brought about largely through verbal trickery in each story. Gandalf, once returned and suitably concealed, uses a flexible range of vocal abilities in adopting and shifting between the personae of the trolls in order to cajole them into fighting with each other until such a time as sunset approaches and turns them into stone. Odysseus announces himself under a fake title to Polyphemus, “Outis”76 or ‘Nobody’, which will cause the monster to declare to his fellow Cyclopes that ‘Nobody is attacking me’,77 thus ensuring that he cannot call on the help of his neighbours to defeat Odysseus, who has already blinded the ogre. Finally, in each story the giants are punished for their anthropophagy: Polyphemus is blinded, deserted by his fellow Cyclopes, and robbed of his livestock, while the trolls are forever turned into rigid monuments. The heroes are, in turn, rewarded—Odysseus claims all of Polyphemus’ sheep, and the dwarven company uncovers some priceless weapons and not a little gold in the troll stash. A clear reference to the Homeric episode is made by Tolkien in titling this chapter of his book, ‘Roast Mutton’: although these monsters have the option of eating sheep, they seem far more desirous of ‘humanoid’ or dwarf flesh; moreover sheep later play a pivotal role in Odysseus’ escape from Polyphemus’ cave. 73  Ruud (2011) 113. 74  Stevens & Stevens (2008) 23. 75  A further point is in the animalization of the ‘prey’; Odysseus’ men become puppies (Hom. Od. 9.289), while Bilbo is a “little rabbit” for the trolls (Tolkien (1997) 36). 76  Hom. Od. 9.366. 77  Hom. Od. 9.408.

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The Odyssey and The Hobbit provide inversions of the normal host-guest relationship in these episodes, where the guest, normally expected to be food, is himself turned into the object of the feast.78 The savage79 inhospitality of hosts is dealt with by the efforts of Odysseus and Gandalf who employ the ‘magical’ trickery of language to confound the dim-witted antagonists and ensure that punishment is received for the crimes against hospitality and that the guests are able to survive the ordeal. But one should be careful not to lay all the blame upon the ‘hosts’ in these episodes: Odysseus’ actions are reckless in firstly entering the primitive cave and he acts against the better judgment of his men, who recommend a quick pillage and return to the ships, and then in proudly declaring his desire to be entertained;80 and the Ithacan cannot be behaving in accordance with xenia by helping himself to the host’s victuals during his absence, before any formal introduction has been made.81 Similarly, Bilbo and the dwarves cannot necessarily claim to be wronged by a ‘host’ since they do not introduce themselves as ‘guests’ but rather act as burglars. The failed hospitality which we observe in this and many other adventures of Odysseus and Bilbo can thus be observed from the position of both host and guest. Similar episodes in The Hobbit where hospitality is inverted and guests suffer the risk of anthropophagy82 are evident in Bilbo’s negotiation of terms with Gollum in his cave and in the dwarves’ entrapment in the webs of the spiders; likewise, Odysseus loses men to the voracious Laestrygonians and to Scylla. The second major threat to the Ithacans in their quest home lies not in literally being turned into food, but rather in the danger of the terminal delay, of forgetting about their nostos altogether.83 They experience such a threat firstly among the Lotus Eaters, whose fruit renders all those who consume it oblivious to everything but his own stomach; secondly, the witch Circe does indeed delay the Ithacans’ voyage by an entire year, offering Odysseus and his men innumerable feasts;84 and, lastly, Calypso keeps Odysseus on her island, Ogygia, for seven whole years.

78  Reece (1993) 134–135. 79  These antagonists appropriately live in preternatural geographic areas, distinct from the Greek world observable elsewhere in the Odyssey and denoted by Tolkien’s term ‘Wilderland’. 80   Cf. Hom. Od. 224–233. 81  Pucci (1998) 116–117. 82  Or the ‘hobbitish’/dwarven equivalent. 83  Bakker (2013) 42, Most (1989) 24. 84  Bakker (2013) 88.

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In The Hobbit too, the possibility of a delay in the voyage to reclaim the dwarven home is highlighted at several points. Although Elrond provides the travellers with all the amenities which they could desire and an important respite after their scuffle with the trolls, his hospitality is too generous. The guests, Bilbo in particular, risk forgetting about their journey and are tempted to stay with their host forever: They stayed long in that good house, fourteen days at least, and they found it hard to leave. Bilbo would gladly have stopped there for ever and ever—even supposing a wish would have taken him right back to his hobbit-hole without trouble.85 The sexual charms which both Circe and Calypso offer Odysseus, as well as the general luxury of their quasi-divine life, pose such a danger to that hero as well. By providing too generous a hospitality, such a host risks rendering his guest forever homeless. In total Odysseus passes eight years in the company of the two immortals, and not to the detriment of his own home, which is rapidly being taken over by the suitors; Bilbo will too, upon returning home, find that his status as the host, or owner, of his home is being questioned: his possessions—furniture, appliances, cutlery, trinkets—are being auctioned off. The second delay, or rather threat of a delay, which Bilbo and the dwarves suffer is at the hands of the goblin hosts who try to imprison them, only to be thwarted by the magic of Gandalf’s staff. Thirdly, the company of fourteen86 is detained by the elven king in Mirkwood. In this episode of delay, I think we can detect some parallels in the Circean episode of the Odyssey, when the men land on the island of Aiaia. The protagonists have to move through forests to arrive at the homes of the hosts, who are immortal (elves and a goddess). On the way through the woodland, both Thorin and Odysseus encounter a deer, which is exceptional in some way,87 and kill the animal. Bilbo climbs a high tree to get a view of the surrounding forest, and Odysseus scouts out the wooded Aiaia from the vantage point of a hill. Finally, the characters are tempted into approaching the immortal beings: in the case of the dwarves, they are lured by the feasting of a party of elves, whereas Odysseus’ men are attracted first by Circe’s enchanting singing and are then compelled to stay through the food which she offers them. Odysseus’ men, transfigured into swine, are locked 85  Tolkien (1997) 48. 86  At this stage in the story, Gandalf has departed on his own quest against the ‘Necromancer’. 87  In The Hobbit the deer jumps over the broad river in a single leap; in the Odyssey the deer is described as monstrous, “πελώρου” (Hom Od. 10.168).

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in a pig pen, while Thorin, firstly, and later the other dwarves are imprisoned by the elf king. In order to rescue their companions from the unfriendly hosts, Odysseus and Bilbo are compelled to draw on supernatural aid: Hermes, the messenger of the gods, provides Odysseus with the means to defeat Circe—a precious plant called Molly, which will render the hero immune to Circe’s potion; Bilbo can only enter the hidden realm of the woodland elves on account of his newly-pilfered magic ring, which becomes a magical surrogate in Gandalf’s absence.88 Bilbo’s actual solution to escape the cave of the elves is reminiscent of another moment of Odyssean subtlety to find a way out of the cave of the hostile Polyphemus: while the Ithacans ride out into the open, tied to the bellies of the ogre’s sheep, the dwarves ride out of the elven kingdom inside barrels.89 Apart from anthropophagous hosts and hosts who threaten a delay— whether their intention is benevolent like Elrond, malevolent like the goblins, or somewhat ambiguous like the woodland elves90—a third type in The Hobbit is to be closely associated with the animal world: the eagles and Beorn. In these two hosts there is an ambivalent attitude towards helping the guests. Beorn is to be approached with extreme caution, his antagonism to dwarves being wellknown; and even when his hospitality is ensured through the verbal trickery of the wizard—the enchantment of ‘the good story’, like Odysseus’ tale to the Phaeacians—the guests are told not to venture out at night, seeing that his animal/bear form is still a danger to them. Later they are warned by Gandalf against appropriating the ponies which Beorn has temporarily lent them, whereupon they would find him to be a somewhat less agreeable host. The aid of the eagles is chiefly assured through Gandalf’s friendly relations with them; and there is an alarming moment, though Bilbo later realizes that he has misinterpreted the statement, when one of the eagles refers to the company as “prisoners”.91 In the Tolkien narrative it is Gandalf who acts as a bridge between the companions and the natural world, similarly, in the Homeric, Odysseus is a 88  Despite the manifestation of the magic ring in The Lord of the Rings as being the ‘One Ring’, the weapon of the satanic-figure Sauron, I do not regard the ring as entailing any such wholly negative connotations in the universe of the Hobbit. The ‘problem’ of the Ring and of the entire chapter, ‘Riddles in the Dark’, was recognized by Tolkien himself as presenting a point of major incongruency between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (Tolkien (2006) 141). 89  Ruud (2011) 119. We might find further points of similarity in the two episodes in that the hosts are weakened through a potent alcoholic tonic. 90  Ruud (2011) 111. 91  Tolkien (1997) 104. Like Beorn, the eagles are no friends to dwarves (Tolkien (1997) 105).

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necessary mediator between his men and the supernatural, divine hosts (Aeolus, Circe, and, indirectly, Helios): thus while Odysseus warns his men against slaying the cattle of the sun god, Helios, Gandalf cautions the dwarves against stealing Beorn’s ponies. In both these episodes transgressions against animals, which are guarded over by supernatural hosts, will quickly turn the guests into enemies of a host. Again, I would add that these episodes illustrate both Gandalf’s and Odysseus’ superior connection with agents who lie beyond the human realm and how this is then reflected in their ability to attain favourable hospitality, although in Odysseus’ case he ultimately cannot save his reckless crew from destruction. In Laketown, Thorin publically proclaims himself as the returned king, which, in combination with legends of his return, ensures his popularity and the hospitality of the Master of Laketown, who provides the company with boats, beasts of burden, and provisions for their expedition to the Lonely Mountain.92 Despite his bold advertisement of his return, as a dispossessed host Thorin does not act with any great authority upon arriving at the secret door to his kingdom; in fact he has no plan as to how the company will get rid of the dragon which occupies his ancestral halls: “[this] had always been a weak point in their plans, as Bilbo felt inclined to point out”.93 His only solution is to turn to Bilbo. As a ‘host’, therefore, Thorin is now not unlike the impotent Bilbo we first come across in Bag End, whose ineffectiveness as ‘burglar’ is a matter of common observation and whose authority is only saved by a wizard. In this episode, however, there is no Gandalf to rescue Thorin Oakenshield, the indecisive king. By now, however, Bilbo Baggins has grown sufficiently to adopt the role of the wizard, namely by using magic, both real and verbal, to try to get the better of Smaug: firstly, he uses his ring to be able to talk to the dragon (no mean feat in itself, if we compare it to the timidity of the dwarves); and, secondly, he employs riddles, like he does with Gollum, to try his luck at finding some weakness in his foe—which he does in noticing a bare patch in the worm’s armour, a weakness which Bard will later exploit. Although the dragon is destroyed by another agent in the story, Bilbo’s endeavour is successful in reinstalling Thorin as host of the Lonely Mountain by, somewhat accidently, compelling the dragon to vacate his halls and to attack Laketown. In employing a magical means to get rid of Smaug and install the rightful host of the home, Bilbo is not unlike Odysseus. Whereas the hobbit becomes 92  It is worth noting that this chapter, ‘A Warm Welcome’, like several others (‘An Unexpected Party’, ‘A Short Rest’, ‘Queer Lodgings’, ‘On The Doorstep’, and ‘Not At Home’), centres the events of the respective sections on a home or a reception in a home. 93  Tolkien (1997) 207.

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physically invisible in order to converse with the dragon and get to know his enemy, we witness Odysseus also concealing his identity when he arrives back at his oikos, taking the guise of a beggar in learning first-hand the insults of the suitors upon his wife and son. Furthermore, while Bilbo’s magic ring enables him to talk with Smaug and win the Lonely Mountain back, it is only by a supernatural means, namely with the direct help of the goddess Athena, that Odysseus can truly manage to claim his home back. With the dragon vanquished and the lost dwarven kingdom restored to Thorin Oakenshield and his kin, we might expect that the quest and the story have now largely been completed. This, however, is to ignore the failure of the dwarves to understand the hospitality which is now expected of them as hosts. Upon regaining his home, Thorin is warned by a raven about the arrival of both elves from Mirkwood and refugees from Laketown, their home destroyed by the dragon; the bird’s advice is one of conciliation: We would see peace once more among dwarves and men and elves after the long desolation; but it may cost you dear in gold.94 Thorin’s response, however, is antagonistic: to secure his home, to turn it into an impregnable fortress to keep his riches safe, and to send word to other dwarves, residing in the Iron Hills, to come to their aid in preparation for war.95 His conception of hospitality is solipsistic: whereas Bilbo lounged in his own comfort at the start of the novel, home for Thorin is a storage pit for his own wealth—not all that different, ironically, from the Lonely Mountain’s previous landlord.96 Bilbo’s adventure has educated him into seeking a course of conduct which will bring about peace between hosts and guests—he seeks to sacrifice his own share in the treasure, a valuable heirloom called the Arkenstone, in order to avoid bloodshed between the different people. Thorin, however, has not yet learned the value of co-operation which his journey from home to home, host to host, ought to have taught him. He treats Bard and the people of Laketown as “robbers”97 rather than destitute guests, although ironically it was the dwarves who sought to reinstate themselves as hosts through robbery, while their real homecoming is thanks to the actions of Bard. This is not to mention the obvious reciprocity demanded by the dwarves having been hosted by the men of Laketown prior to their arrival at the Lonely 94  Tolkien (1997) 245. 95  Ibid., 246. 96  Green (2008) 34. 97  Tolkien (1997) 252.

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Mountain. Thorin’s hubristic rejection of these beggared guests can be compared to the confrontational response of the suitors to Odysseus, concealed in the raiment of a beggar. Both the dwarves and the suitors gained their homes through the destruction of others: the former through Laketown (unleashing the dragon), the latter by squatting in Odysseus’ oikos; and yet both parties are immune to the needs of guests, who would impose upon their unjustly gained wealth and resources, and even threaten violence—Thorin shoots an arrow as a warning shot to Bard’s herald, while Antinous, one of the suitors, throws a chair at Odysseus. The inhospitality of the dwarves and the suitors is paid off in sequences of battle, where lives are the cost of the failure to recognize xenia: almost all the suitors die, while Thorin, as the principal host, and his two cousins, Fili and Kili, are killed. There are distinguishing nuances in the two plots which are to be observed of course: in The Hobbit the battle is directed at a common enemy, goblins— the three races, and particularly the dwarves, realizing at the last moment the folly of their seclusion, while in The Odyssey almost all the suitors are slain by Odysseus and Telemachus, with the help of Athena. The crimes against hospitality—accidental destruction of another’s home and wilful occupation of another’s—are not identical; but then again the punishment of the dwarves is far less severe and they are given a chance for redemption, offering hospitality to the bereaved after the battle. The atonement of the dwarves after the battle, paying shares of their treasure to their guests, indicates a resolution to their earlier inhospitality; the real moral progression of the novel, however, has of course to come through the unlikely hero, Bilbo Baggins. Upon his return from his many adventures, the hobbit’s home is no longer a place of solitary comfort, in which a guest—so long as he is not troublesome—may be invited in; to the contrary, it is open to travellers far and wide. Such a reception is not welcomed by his xenophobic neighbours, for whom Bilbo has lost his respectability, but, we are told, “he did not mind”.98 As a story of hospitality we can broadly divide The Hobbit into three parts: in the first, we witness the inadequacies of Bilbo as a host and the dwarves as guests (but also dispossessed hosts); the second part might be termed ‘educational’ in that the company of travellers is made to endure various kinds of reception by hosts—malevolent, benevolent, or something in-between;99 and in the final section of the novel, the characters respond to this instruction, ultimately providing ideal models of hospitality. In this movement in the story 98  Tolkien (1997) 288. 99  Green (2008) 34–35.

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from a negative realization of hospitality to a positive, welcoming approach to reception of others The Hobbit is not unlike Homer’s Odyssey. The Greek epic commences100 with two plot threads where characters are confronted with an improper observation of hospitality—Telemachus’ status as a host is completely disrespected by the suitors, while Odysseus has been detained on the isle of Ogygia for seven years as Calypso’s ‘guest’. In both of these story lines there is what we could call an ‘education in xenia’, wherein Telemachus is shown a model of respectful hospitality by powerful hosts, Nestor and Menelaus,101 and Odysseus tells a story to his somewhat ambivalent hosts, Phaeacians, which has a strong argumentative function in presenting several different episodes which are focused around a reception.102 Lastly, Odysseus and Telemachus act together in purging their household of the irreverent guests, restoring the rightful hosts of the home. In addition to this similarity in describing a three part quest or movement of xenia, the two works, ancient and modern, display several points of tangency in representing specific types of attitude and behaviour of hosts and guests to hospitality. At the beginning of the story Bilbo is an ambivalent host like the Phaeacians, content to open his doors to those strangers who will not disturb his comfort. Like the men of Scheria, there is very real risk that his embarking on a nostos journey will result in a change in his experience of home, or worse, in his destruction. The dwarves, on the other hand, in their initially intimidating attitude to a young Bilbo Baggins, provide a guest-host situation not dissimilar to that between the suitors and Telemachus, wherein a group of older, more experienced guests question the authority of an inexperienced host. The dwarves, although not as openly disrespectful as the suitors, still have no qualms about risking the life of their host, Bilbo, in order to render themselves in possession of a home once more. The central section of The Hobbit provides two types of threat to hospitality, which are strongly reminiscent of the Odyssey: firstly, the danger of being destroyed, mainly through anthropophagy, by a host, and, secondly, the chance of being delayed or detained eternally. There are particularly strong descriptive linkages between the episode of the trolls and Polyphemus, and to a lesser extent, that of the wood elves to Circe. In both stories, moreover, I observed that the correct state of hospitality was ultimately brought about through a battle in which there is a loss of

100  Odysseus is on Calypso’s island at the time of the events in Book 1, though we only turn to him in Book 5. 101  Rose (1969) 394. 102  Most (1989) 19, 29–30.

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life of irreverent hosts, after which there is peace between neighbours, both in Middle Earth and on Ithaca. Comparison of The Hobbit with the Odyssey not only leads to structural similarities in identifying a story centered around a movement in xenia and in exploring specific responses to hospitality, but it also, importantly, shows Tolkien’s work to be fundamentally ethical in intention. We might start here by observing that xenia is not merely a polite social decorum in the Homeric world; it is governed by religious weight. When he speaks to the cannibalistic ogre, Polyphemus, Odysseus asks him to show him and his men hospitality, giving them the rightful ‘gifts of a guest’, “δωτίνην”.103 Importantly, the hero gives Zeus the epithet “ξείνιος”;104 the king of the gods is directly responsible for the welfare of guests and travellers—to disregard the rights of a guest is to offend Zeus “ἐπιτιμήτωρ”,105 or ‘avenger’, and to risk his punishment. Odysseus further demonstrates the ethical imperative behind xenia by approaching the oneeyed monster in the manner of a suppliant, prostrating himself at the knees of his host, “κιχανόμενοι τὰ σὰ γοῦνα”.106 Of course, Polyphemus, a savage, living on an island far away from the Greek world, declares his aloofness from Zeus and happily snatches two of Odysseus’ companions and devours them; he violates xenia knowing that this entails an ethical disregard for the Olympian deities. Tolkien’s ethical conceptualizing of hospitality is, I would argue, just as marked as the Homeric in permitting a supernatural authority to govern hostguest situations. Whereas improper xenia in the Greek poem is resolved either by the gods107 or by Odysseus himself, who has access to the divine realm through his close ties with Athena as a mētis hero or, at other times, through the enchantment of his words, in the modern work, improper hospitality is almost always resolved by an implementation of magic, mainly through its personification in the form of the wizard Gandalf. Most of the receptions in homes are moderated by his supernatural presence. Gandalf tricks Bilbo into giving up his solipsistic attitude towards home, he makes sure the dwarves are respectful enough of Bilbo as a host, the trolls are defeated by his verbal gymnastics, he guides the company into the safe haven of Elrond’s Homely House, the goblins’ enslavement of the dwarves is halted by a burst of ‘real’ magic from the wizard’s staff, the haughty Beorn is made amenable to his guests through Gandalf’s storytelling, and, importantly, it is he who directs the attention of men, dwarves, and elves from their mutual destruction by pointing out a 103  Hom. Od. 9.268. 104  Hom. Od. 9.271. 105  Hom. Od. 9.270. 106  Hom. Od. 9.266. 107  For example, Athena presides over Odysseus’ slaughtering of the irreverent suitors.

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common foe. The wizard’s constant presence as an agent of magic in monitoring social frictions in hospitality scenes points to a governing supernatural force in The Hobbit. Furthermore, scrutinizing Tolkien’s other mythologies, it is apparent that Gandalf is really not a wizard in the traditional fairy-tale manifestation but a kind of spirit, who has come to Middle Earth from The Undying Lands, Tolkien’s representation of heaven, and that the ‘magic’ which he employs, and indeed his very presence, is an indication of a divine or angelic governing hand.108 Such an interpretation aligns Tolkien’s work even closer with the Homeric in providing a god-like authority behind hospitality. I should also observe that the ‘magic’ which Gandalf characteristically employs can be actual otherworldly magic, represented by the instrumental power of his staff, but also a kind of human ‘magic’ employed through artifice and trickery: thus, most frequently, he uses the power of words and, in macro-form, storytelling to get the better of inimical hosts such as the trolls and indifferent hosts such as Beorn. In employing words as one of his magical tools, a means to win over or defeat hosts, Gandalf is not too different from the crafty, polumētis Odysseus, who employs verbal trickery to defeat Polyphemus and whose entire speech in the Apologue is itself a form of verbal enchantment, an argumentative exercise to ensure the hospitality of the Phaeacians. Bilbo himself learns from Gandalf in employing these two kinds of magic to overcome inimical receptions: thus he can use the real magic of the ring in, for example, confronting Smaug, as well as his own natural craft (in conjunction with the ring) in escaping from Mirkwood. Importantly then, the success of Bilbo Baggins in the latter half of the novel is predicated upon his education from the ‘divine figure’ of Gandalf, who has shown the hobbit how different kinds of magic—real and its human equivalent—can be employed to his success in mediating inhospitable situations. Reading The Hobbit in conjunction with the Odyssey helps us re-evaluate how we are to understand Tolkien’s story: not as an heroic quest,109 nor as a geo-political quest,110 nor even as a psychological quest,111 but as an ethical 108  John R.R. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales (London: Harper Collins, 2014) 502–520. 109  The dwarven quest is a stock of heroic epic and medieval romance: to (re)gain treasure, to slay a dragon, and for the true king to return to his throne (Tolkien, unusually, combines all three). 110  An alternative perspective of The Hobbit is to insist that the novel must be read in intertextual dialogue with Tolkien’s other works set in the mythical, pre-historic landscape of Middle Earth, in particular with The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955); such an interpretation has been recently adopted in popular culture by film director, Peter Jackson, who attempts to place the events of the Hobbit in the context of the action of The Lord of the Rings, adding characters and storylines which don’t feature in The Hobbit. 111  Ruud (2001) 96.

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quest. It is an ethics which does not lie in an absolute framework of good versus evil—a common criticism of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings112—but rather in the social institution of the home. The morality prescribed is that of mutual respect, from host to guest, guest to host. And as in Homer’s Odyssey, it is a relationship which is answerable to a higher power, not a mere social pleasantry.113 Bibliography Bakker, Egbert J., The Meaning of Meat and the Structure of the Odyssey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Carpenter, Humphrey, J.R.R. Tolkien: a Biography (London: Harper Collins, 2002). Jong, Irene J.F. De, A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Dimock, George E., “The Name of Odysseus”, The Hudson Review 9.1 (1956) 52–70. Dougherty, Carol, The Raft of Odysseus: the Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Eaton, Dustin, “Homer”, in Michael D.C. Drout (ed.), J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment (New York: Routledge, 2007) 284–285. Edwards, Anthony T., “Homer’s Ethical Geography: Country and City in the Odyssey”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 123 (1993) 27–78. Green, William H., “Bilbo’s Adventures in Wilderland”, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2008) 27–42. Gross, Nicolas P., “Nausicaa: a Feminine Threat”, Classical World, 69.5 (1976) 311–317. Levy, Harry L., “The Odyssean Suitors and the Host-Guest Relationship”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 94 (1963) 145–153. McNulty, Tracy, The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Minton, William W., “Homer’s Invocations of the Muses: Traditional Patterns”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 91 (1960) 292–309. Most, Glenn W., “The Structure and Function of Odysseus’ Apologoi”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 119 (1989) 15–30. 112  Walter Scheps, “The Fairy-Tale Morality of The Lord of the Rings”, in Jared Lobdell (ed.), A Tolkien Compass (La Salle: Open Court Press, 1975). 44, 53–54. 113  The financial assistance from the following organizations contributed towards this research: 1) The National Research Foundation of South Africa; 2) University of Cape Town; 3) The Classical Association of South Africa (2013–2014); 4) The Oppenheimer Memorial Trust.

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Pucci, Pietro, Odysseus Polutropos: Intertextual Readings in the Odyssey and the Iliad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). Pucci, Pietro, The Song of the Sirens: Essays on Homer (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, INC, 1998). Reece, Steve, The Stranger’s Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993). Reinhardt, Karl, “The Adventures in the Odyssey”, in Seth L. Schein (ed.), Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretative Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 63–132. Rose, Gilbert P., “The Unfriendly Phaeacians”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 100 (1969) 387–406. Ruud, Jay, Critical Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien: a Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts On File, Inc, 2011). Segal, Charles, “Divine Justice in the Odyssey: Poseidon, Cyclops, and Helios”, American Journal of Philology 113.4 (1992) 489–518. Stevens, David & Carol D. Stevens, C.D., “The Hobbit”, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2008) 17–26. Tolkien, J.R.R., The Hobbit: or There and Back Again (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997). Tolkien, J.R.R., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (London: Harper Collins, 2006). Tolkien, J.R.R., Unfinished Tales (London: Harper Collins, 2014). Webber, Alice, “The Hero Tells His Name: Formula and Variation in the Phaeacian Episode of the Odyssey”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 119 (1989) 1–13.

CHAPTER 9

Cupid and Psyche: A Love Story (?) in Comics and Children’s Literature Lily Glasner Greco-Roman mythology enjoys a special status in western culture. It is regarded both as a part of the adult world, for example it is studied in Universities, and as light entertainment suitable for children, 1997 Walt Disney’s production of Hercules and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series are but two well-known examples.1 Yet, some of these tales contain explicit sexual ingredients which raises the question of how contemporary adaptations for children are handling these potentially loaded contents?2 In Poetics of Children’s Literature (1986), Zohar Shavit examined the unwritten norms and practices of translating texts “from the adult system into the children’s” (111). Shavit observed the almost unquestioned right of the adult to change source texts during the process of adapting them for children: Unlike contemporary translators of adult books, the translator of children’s literature can permit himself great liberties regarding the text, as a result of the peripheral position of children’s literature within the literary polysystem […] the translator is permitted to manipulate the text in various ways by changing, enlarging, or abridging it or by deleting or adding to it (112).3 1  My main purpose here is to point to the dual nature and status of Greco-Roman mythology in western contemporary culture, being both part of “adult world” and of “children’s world”, being both “serious matter” and “light matter”. However, Greco-Roman mythology also functions as “light entertainment” in the adult world (e.g. Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips), as well as “serious matter” in the children’s world (e.g. as part of school’s curriculum). 2  For the purposes of the present discussion the term children’s literature encompasses texts that are aimed at children and/or youth. I will not try to differentiate the two, rather children and youth (young adults) will be treated as one category, understood to be positioned in an age binary: adult—non-adult. 3  Verily, in the last decade a new theoretical approach is being advocated with regard to adaptations in general. Thus, in A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon gives an alternative explanation to the nature of adaptations: “[t]here are many and varied motives behind

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Looking into adaptations for children of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a novel which originally was intended for adult readership, Shavit concludes: In fact, it can even be formulated as a rule that when it is possible to delete undesirable scenes without damaging the basic plot or characterizations, translators will not hesitate to do so. Hence all translators of Gulliver’s Travels happily give up the scene where Gulliver is suspected of having a love affair with the queen, for such a scene violates the taboo on sexual activity in children’s literature. (123) 30 years later, with perhaps no taboo subjects left, even in the field of children’s literature, is this assessment still valid?4 In this chapter I will probe this very question by examining contemporary adaptations for children of one pivotal classical myth in western culture, the tale of Cupid and Psyche.5 The tale as it is told in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) is colored with sexual utterances and overtones. It is therefore particularly suitable to be used as a case study. However, before delving into Apuleius’ text and the adaptations, a short review of the contemporary controversy around the inclusion of sexual contents in children’s literature is due.

adaptation and few involve faithfulness […] Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication. And there are manifestly many different possible intentions behind the act of adaptation: the urge to consume and erase the memory of the adapted text or to call it into question is as likely as the desire to pay tribute by copying” (XIII, 7, for Hutcheon’s detailed discussion on the various motives for creating an adaptation, see 85–95). In other words, that which Shavit identified as a deviation Hutcheon identifies as the norm. 4  I differentiate a taboo subject from a controversial one. If the law does not prohibit publication of specific subjects—sexual content in books for children being a case in point—and there are in fact such books in the public sphere (e.g. on the open shelves of some or all public libraries, and/or book stores), then we may be dealing with a controversial subject but not with a taboo. Nevertheless, such a (controversial) subject may be considered a taboo in a certain community (e.g. in an ultra-orthodox community) or in a certain family. 5  Throughout the paper I will be using both names of the deity, Cupid / Eros, each time maintaining the name used by the text I am referring to. Otherwise I will employ the name Cupid, in agreement with Apuleius’ text which serves as the source text in my discussion.

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Children’s Literature, Sex and Censorship

A common motivation and justification for manipulating texts intended for young audiences is preventing harm, which in effect translates textual manipulations into an act of censorship.6 A main characteristic which ignites this kind of censorship is sexual content. The on-going controversy around books such as Robie H. Harris’ It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health (1994), or Judy Blume’s novel Forever (1975) demonstrates that indeed the common world view, according to which a sexual content is not suitable for young audiences is very much alive in western culture.7 Verily, the term “sexual contents” may refer to very different topics, from masturbation to breastfeeding, from an explanation of what is an orgasm to a story about abortion or sexual abuse. In her introduction to children’s literature, Kimberley Reynolds writes: “[Outside academia] Occasionally, questions are asked about whether something is suitable for a juvenile audience, a question usually provoked by concern about content—is it too sexually explicit? Too frightening? Too morally ambiguous?” (Reynolds, Children’s Literature 1). In a recent panel on sex and violence in children’s literature, held in New York, the moderator had raised the question “whether there are any books or subjects that do go over the edge” (Goddu, n.p.). One of the panelists, author Susan Kuklin, replied: “No. It’s about how the subject is handled and what age group the book is written for” (ibid). 6  This motivation (preventing harm) may also be viewed as a manifestation of power relations / power dynamic between adults and children (see for example, Reynolds, Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2007) 115–116). On censorship and children’s literature, see for example: McClure, “Censorship”, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 8.1 (1983) 22–25; Foerstel, Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2006); Booth, “Censorship”, in Philip Nel and Lissa Paul (eds.), Keywords for Children’s Literature (New York: NYU Press, 2011) 26–30; Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006) 118. On the special case of comic books and censorship (The Comic Code), see for example: Wertham, “It’s Still Murder: What Parents Still Don’t Know About Comic Books”, The Saturday Review (09 April, 1955) 11–12, 46–48; Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The Origins and History of the Comics Code (Jackson, MI: UP of Mississippi, 1998); Nyberg, “How Librarians Learned to Love the Graphic Novel”, in Robert G. Weiner (ed.), Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries and Archives: Essays on Readers, Research, History, and Cataloging (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010) 26–40; Wolk, Douglas, “R.I.P.: The Comics Code Authority.” TIME.com. (24 January 2011) http://techland.time.com/2011/01/24/r-i-p-the-comics-code-authority/ (accessed 02 Febuary 2016). 7  On readers and public reactions to Blume and Harris’ books see respectively: Foerstel (2006) 244–245, 204–206.

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Publications, public controversies, educational systems, authors’ interviews and literary studies, reveal that during the last decades western societies exhibit duality towards sexual content in children’s literature.8 Sandra L. Beckett’s 2009 study on crossover literature, mirrors this very phenomenon. On the one hand she points out that since the 1970s sexual content is being incorporated into literature published for young readers. The sexual content has become more and more explicit and today “there are very few, if any, taboo subjects” (265). On the other hand, she asserts that “A number of authors who crosswrite children and adults have claimed that the basic, perhaps only, difference between their adult and children’s fiction is that the latter contains no sex” (263). Furthermore, she observes that “Although [sexual] scenes are now much more common in children’s and young adult fiction, they still provoke controversy” (264).9 In light of this dual tendency in current children’s literature, it appears that a creator of a children’s adaptation can (at least potentially) decide whether to keep, delete or conceal sexual contents. Equipped with this awareness we can now turn to the classical text and its contemporary adaptations for young audiences. 2

Cupid and Psyche—The Adult Version10

Princess Psyche was so beautiful that people worshiped her instead of Venus. The insulted and infuriated goddess sends her son, Cupid, to avenge her. She commands him to inflict Psyche with one of his arrows in order to make her fall in love with the vilest and most underprivileged man on earth. Meanwhile, 8   For studies that emphasize the dramatic changes that have occurred, since the late 1960s, in the field of children’s literature with regard to sexual content, see: Paul, “Sex and the Children’s Book”, The Lion and the Unicorn 29.2 (2005) 222–235; Reynolds (2007) (chapter 6). The new liberalities and controversies are, of course, not restricted to books. See, for example, Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Vintage Books, 1982). 9   “In a 2009 survey of librarians […] 87 percent said the main reason they avoid certain books is because they include sexuality or sex education. […] Teachers and administrators are often pressured to remove these books from schools.” (Booth (2011) 29). 10  Although the myth is a well-known one, hereafter I have incorporated a rather lengthy synopsis which enables me to emphasize details which are crucial for the discussion that will follow. For those less familiar with the tale, it should be noted that, embedded in Apuleius’ text, the love of Cupid and Psyche is a story within a story (The Golden Ass 4.28– 6.24). For the significance of this technique in Apuleius’ text see Kenney’s introduction in: Apuleius, Cupid & Psyche (ed. E.J. Kenney [Including Introduction and Commentary]) (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 12–16.

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Psyche’s sisters are wedded but no suitor asks Psyche’s hand in marriage. Her worried father consults with the oracle. Apollo answers that she must be left on the top of the mountain for she is doomed to be the bride of a monster. Her parents are stricken but Psyche herself accepts the verdict. Alone and terrified she awaits her husband on the mountain. At long last it is Zephyrus who arrives and carries her to her betrothed’s astounding palace. Unseen voices declare that all the palace’s splendor and luxuries are hers and they are her servants. Deep in the night her unknown husband arrives and claims her. Thus begins her new life—all day long alone at the rich palace and at night visited by her unknown husband who she is forbidden to see. Burdened by her loneliness she implores her unknown husband to bring her sisters to visit her. Reluctantly he agrees but warns her lest she will follow their ill advice to see his face. Thrice her sisters are brought to her. On their third visit the jealous sisters persuade the now pregnant Psyche that her unknown husband is indeed a monster who is about to devour her and her unborn child therefore she must kill him that very night. After her husband falls asleep the perplexed and unsure Psyche follows the murderous plan her sisters devised. Yet in the light of the oil lamp she discovers his true identity. Exploring his arrows she unintentionally pricks herself and falls madly in love with him, then a drop of oil from the lamp she is holding drips and burns his shoulder. Feeling betrayed Cupid abandons Psyche but not before telling her that he became her lover and husband because he had pricked himself on his own arrow. Brokenhearted Psyche tries, unsuccessfully, to commit suicide by drowning herself in the river. Then, following the advice of Pan, she decides to try and gain Cupid’s forgiveness. But first she takes revenge on her treacherous sisters, tricking each sister into jumping from the top of the mountain to her death, whilst believing Zephyrus waits there to carry her to Cupid who wishes to marry her instead of Psyche who had betrayed him. Continuing in vain her search for her husband, and being denied help by both Ceres and Juno, Psyche realizes she must seek the forgiveness and help of Venus herself. Yet the goddess does not wish to pardon Psyche. After torturing and beating her she sets four impossible tasks for her. Facing each task Psyche is quick to despair, at times even wanting to commit suicide. Even so, unexpected help from unexpected helpers, who take pity on her, allows her to accomplish each task.11 Returning from her last mission, descending into Tartarus in order to bring Venus some of Proserpine’s beauty, Psyche is tempted to open the forbidden box which allegedly contains 11  On her first task an ant takes pity on her, on the second task a reed by the river comes to her aid, on the third task Jupiter’s eagle comes to the rescue, and on her last task a tower is giving her guidance.

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a portion of the beauty of the goddess. However, this was a trap and immediately she falls into a death like sleep. Meanwhile the sick Cupid, imprisoned all this time in his bed chamber at his mother’s abode, has recovered. He escapes his room, finds Psyche and revives her. Coming to terms with Jupiter he soon legitimately marries Psyche. Prior to the marriage Psyche is given immortality and soon after the marriage she gives birth to their daughter, Pleasure. Throughout the generations the tale has fascinated many readers and generated various readings. Whilst these readings may differ from one another in many respects, common to them is the implied assumption that the literal level of Apuleius’ text is a path leading into a second and more crucial meaning waiting to be deciphered by the reader. Two readings, one pre-modern and one contemporary, will suffice to illustrate this point. According to Boccaccio, the 14th-century Italian writer, the tale is about the relationship between the rational spirit (Psyche) and God (Cupid) (V.22.1–23.17). Man is not allowed to inquire about God hence the prohibition to see him. Her sisters represent sensuality, that which tries to lull reason to sleep. The wound that Psyche inflicts on Cupid signifies her surrender to desire and sensuality. Yet, through repentance and purification: “[s]he reassumes once again the benefit of divine pleasure […] She joins herself to it forever, and while ridding herself of perishable things she is borne to eternal glory, and there she gives birth to Pleasure, that is, delight and eternal happiness” (V.23.17). Six hundred years later the American psychologist, Carol Gilligan, will interpret this tale as an answer to the narrative of trauma that, according to her, governs western culture. Gilligan suggests that “As a map of resistance, it shows a way out of the Oedipus tragedy—a way of breaking the patriarchal cycle” (33). Gilligan’s Psych is a rational being in a fundamentally different way from that which is suggested by Boccaccio’s theological reading. Gilligan writes: “Walking out of an old story, she is a woman for our time. She refuses to live as an object; she breaks the taboos on seeing and speaking about love; she will not risk her own life or that of the child for a promise of immortality” (42–43). Boccaccio and Gilligan’s interpretations demonstrate opposite readings of the tale. Boccaccio presents an allegorical reading rooted in the prevailing Christian theological paradigm of his times,12 whilst Gilligan offers a subversive psychological reading with a strong feminist orientation 12  In a Christian allegorical reading of the myth, as suggested by Boccaccio, Psyche’s movements towards, away and again towards Cupid, can be seen as resonating the theological paradigm of “the chain of being”. Giving in to sensuality (personified by her sisters) Psyche descends away from God. In order to (re)ascend Psyche needs to overcome her earthliness. For a concise account of “the chain of being” see Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Peregrine Books, 1963) 37–38, 40 [the chain as a ladder].

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which seeks to offer an alternative paradigm for western culture at large. As much as these readings may differ from one another they both result from, and find their initial justification in the belief that Apuleius’ text should not be read only in its literal sense (e.g. Boccaccio V.22.11). These interpretations, however, while offering insightful and erudite readings of the tale tend not only to promote the precedence of the allegorical meaning of the text but also to overlook the literal meaning of the text, especially with regard to one particular scene— the nuptial night.13 Therefore before turning to the contemporary adaptations of the tale for children we need to take a closer look at this scene. 3

The Nuptial Night in Apuleius’ Text

We are not told how naïve or far advanced is Psyche with regard to a theoretical knowledge about “the facts of life”, however both the narratrix and Jupiter emphasize that she was a virgin (V.4.2, VI.23.3).14 In other words, the nuptial night was her “sexual initiation” (Bacchilega 73). It is only in a very short passage that Apuleius describes Psyche’s first experience of sex (V.4.1–4). There are no graphic details, but we are told that Psyche is full of fear and dread, then in the dark of night the invisible, unknown husband “mounted the bed and made Psyche his wife” (V.4.3). E.J. Kenney points out that the use of the plus quam perfectum in the sentence (inscenderat— fecerat—discesserat) “suggest a hurried and clandestine consummation, a hint perhaps of […] a guilty conscience” [on Cupid’s part]” (Apuleius, Kenney 144). But it seems that Kenney has in mind Venus (the mother who’s orders Cupid ignores), and not the innocent and defenseless Psyche as the reason for a guilty conscience. Balme and Morwood are more suggestive with regard to the bride herself and according to them the use of the plus quam perfectum “perhaps suggests that everything has happened before Psyche even has time to think” (20). Be as it may, immediately after Cupid’s hasty departure we are told that invisible voices have come to tend the new bride’s “interfectae virginitatis”— her “slain virginity” (V.4.4). According to E.J. Kenney this “metaphor was a favorite with Christian writers” (Apuleius, Kenney 144). Yet, even if this is not

13  It must be emphasized that I do not question here the validity of an allegorical reading in itself, nor the fact that the allegorical meaning and the literal meaning, in a given text, may oppose each other. 14  Henceforth all citations and references to Apuleius’ text (Latin and/or English translation) are to: E.J. Kenney’s edition.

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an original phrase of Apuleius it is still a charged phrase that expresses and reaffirms a traumatic experience.‫‏‬15 After a time, Psyche adapts to her new situation, “as nature has ordained, the novelty of her situation was by custom rendered pleasurable to her” (V.4.5). Even if we take this statement at face value (and not as an ironic one), we are soon told that Psyche identifies herself as a prisoner (V.5.5). The power imbalance between Cupid and Psyche and the fact that she was forced into this marriage,16 is once again implied towards the close of the tale, this time through Jupiter’s words to the assembly of gods and goddesses who partake in the legal marriage of the two: “He [Cupid] has chosen a girl and robbed her virginity” (“puellam elegit et virginitate privavit”, VI. 23.3). Having familiarized ourselves with the nuptial night scene, according to the literal sense, we can now turn to the adaptations of the tale for children in order to consider how they have dealt with the sexual content. 4

Cleaning up Cupid and Psyche’s Tale—Contemporary Adaptations for Children

Modern adaptations for children of Greco-Roman mythology are not a new occurrence. Just to name a few titles: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853), Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes (1856), and Lilian Stoughton Hyde’s book, Favorite Greek Myths (1904) which also includes an adaptation of Psyche’s tale. One may also consider textbooks intended for children learning Latin such as the late 19th century Fabulae Faciles by Francis Ritchie (latter known as Ritchie’s Fabulae Faciles through the American edition prepared by John Copeland Kirtland), or A.M. Croft’s Fabulae Antiquae (1918). Nevertheless, in the last two decades there has been a wave of new adaptations of Greco-Roman mythology intended for children, and within it the tale of Cupid and Psyche is being retold. In spite of the fact that each adaptation may have its own distinctive traits and be based, of course, on different degrees of simplicity or sophistication, the adaptations for children seem to have one trait in common—the creators (both writers and artists) feel, in different degrees, the need to soften and “clean up” the story especially whenever sex and violence occurred in 15  An issue which goes beyond the scope of the present study is whether this scene should be identified as a rape scene (Relihan, “Introduction”, Apuleius. The Golden Ass: Or, A Book of Changes. (Trans. Joel C. Relihan) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007) xxii). 16  In Psyche’s world disregarding the oracle is not an option (IV.34.1).

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Apuleius’ text. Thus, the sexually suggestive kiss Venus gives her son upon asking him to avenge her (IV.31.4) is excluded; Mercury’s pronouncement that whoever brings the runaway Psyche to Venus will win from the very mouth of the goddess erotic kisses (VI.8.3)—is excluded; Jupiter’s request that Cupid pay him back by providing him with a lovely human girl (VI, 22:3–5)—is excluded. Other significant details are also being left out. Most adaptations chose to neglect Psyche’s suicidal attempts. Some authors feel the need to “clean” Psyche’s character of her vindictiveness towards her sisters, either by omitting Psyche’s role in the death of her sisters (it becomes solely their idea to try and reach Cupid’s palace), or by omitting the sisters altogether from the tale (thereby “cleaning out” unpleasant traits, such as jealousy and greed, from human familial relationships), or simply by failing to mention the sisters after Cupid abandons Psyche. Thus it seems that contemporary adaptations of Cupid and Psyche’s tale for children are following the guide line suggested by Susan Kuklin: “It’s about how the subject is handled”. How then is the sexual content at large and the loaded scene of the nuptial night in particular being translated in contemporary adaptations for young audiences? Henceforth three different texts, which were published between 1996 and 2010, will serve as illuminating answers. In a visually beautiful adaptation made by M. Charlotte Craft and K.Y. Craft, Cupid and Psyche (1996, with no page numbers), it is the lonely Psyche herself who journeys to Delphi and receives the unconditional oracle:17 “You will wed […] but to a creature feared by the gods themselves. You must go to the top of the nearest mountain. There you will meet your fate.” On the one hand, this re-telling keeps the ancient inevitability, “what an [unconditional] oracle predicts is bound to happen” (Dodds 181), which for a modern reader may translates as a denial of individual rights.18 On the other hand, the contemporary adaptation blurs the objectification of the heroine by eliminating all carnal

17  In his classic essay on King Oedipus, E.R. Dodds demonstrated the difference between a conditional oracle and an unconditional one (181). He has also persuasively argued that “divine foreknowledge of certain events [does not] imply that all human actions are predetermined” (“On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex”, in Erich Segal (ed.), Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York: Harper, 1983 [1966]) 182. Compare: Pirkei Avot 3:15). 18  Young audiences may very well be sensitive of that. Today children’s literature is abundant with books that deal with human and social injustice. Furthermore, various programs advance the incorporation of the study of human rights already in early stages of education (e.g. the United Nations’ ABC: Teaching Human Rights—Practical activities for primary and Secondary Schools). Of course, an actual child-reader/listener may simply experience it as a tale representing a fictional world governed by different rules from those outside the text.

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references. During their first period together there is no sex and consequently there is no pregnancy. Cupid is not presented as Psyche’s husband, instead he is called either her companion or her host and each has a separate bed chamber. Consequently in this re-telling there is no “interfectae virginitatis” and Psyche, seemingly, is not a body to be taken and violated for somebody else’s pleasure. Only at the end of their adventures are they united in marriage and “in due time they had a daughter, whom they called Joy.” The story ends with an affirmation of the traditional order of things: first legal marriage than procreation. But even then there is no clue as to how they came to have an offspring. However, alongside this very clean text there are subtle references to sexual transgressions embedded in the images that accompany the text. In the illustration depicting Psyche ascending to Cupid’s palace there are two statues, one on each staircase top: a little cupid and a Sphinx—thus the illustration holds reminders of the power of cupiditas and of the tragic story of King Oedipus. And if one remembers that the myth of Oedipus is not just about a man who unknowingly had sexual intercourse with his mother, but also about a couple who could not curb their sexuality (Jocasta and Laius) as well as about a rape (Laius and Chrysippus)19—the pretty illustration becomes less innocent than it may appear at first glance. Furthermore, placed in the middle of the illustration is Psyche dressed in pure white. An image of young innocent bride, she is walking on a surreal staircase between flowers in different states of bloom (from the bud to the full blossoming flower)—another subtle hint at the approaching defloration of the heroine, that is part of the ancient tale. But are we to assume that children reading the book or having the book read to them whilst looking at the illustration will be in possession of both knowledge and interpretive skills to realize what I have just suggested? The sexual content embedded in the illustration, in all probability, is not visible to the young audience nor is intended for them. Furthermore, I believe we can quite safely say that it will be invisible to most adults lacking solid classical education. Therefore one may ponder what kind of reader(s) the re-tellers envisioned, and in what way(s) did they expect their text to be received (i.e. experienced and understood).20 19  On Laius’ sexual transgressions and their consequences, see: Swift, “Sexual and Familial Distortion in Euripides’ Phoenissae”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 139 (2009) 53–87. 20  At this point it might be worthwhile to remember that even in antiquity a mixed audience with regard to their pre-knowledge of the myths sat in the theater. Thus, whilst in a famous fragment by Antiphanes, the Greek playwright, it is proclaimed that the characters and plots of tragedies, like Oedipus, “are well known to the audience before a line is spoken” (Fr. 191, in: Handley, “Comedy”, in P.E. Easterling‫ ‏‬and Bernard M.W. Knox (eds.),

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Stolen Hearts: The Love of Eros and Psyche, is a comics adaptation by Ryan Foley and artist Sankha Banerjee (2009). The story is delivered by a narratrix, a beautiful woman who is the tutor of a young maiden.21 Realizing that her young protégée suffers the rejection and strong objection of her lover’s mother and is in need of encouragement and good counsel she decides to tell her “a story of romance”(7). The main concept that underlines her narrative is that of “true love” in the tradition of classic fairy tales, Mills & Boon novels and Walt Disney animated adaptations of fairy tales, a tradition which in the last decades had come under the scrutiny and criticism of feminist scholars and writers, but is nonetheless very much alive in popular literature.22 The idea of “true love” is hammered, time and time again, throughout the narrative. The accumulation of repetitions is meant to create a self-evidentiary “re-validation” of this idea: According to the oracle Psyche will find “her true love” (20). Zephyrus, the messenger who carries Psyche to Eros’ house, tells her: “He is to be your true love, Psyche” (22). Even her conniving sisters unwittingly admit to this truth when they declare to her that, “Father sent emissaries to Apollo’s oracle to find love for you” (emphasis is mine, 38). Upon abandoning her, Psyche realizes that she loves Eros (47). Although it is not pronounced explicitly we are invited to realize that this is true love since no magic is involved here—this Psyche does not pierce herself with one of Eros’ arrows. On her first confrontation with Aphrodite, Psyche announces that she will be able to regain Eros’ love “with the power of love” (53). She will also define her final task as “a labor of love” The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 1, Greek Literature (Cambridge. University Press, 1985) 412), Aristotle claimed that it is only the very few who are familiar with the traditional tales but even so they delight all (Poetics 1451b25). 21  In Apuleius’ text the narratrix is an old woman, a servant of a robber’s band, trying to comfort a young maiden, Charite, whom the robbers abducted (on the parallel between Psyche’s story and Charite’s story, see: Papaioannou, “Charite’s Rape, Psyche on the Rock and the Parallel Function of Marriage in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses”, Mnemosyne 51.3 (1998) 302–324). In light of the overall tone and style of Foley and Banerjee’s adaptation it seems doubtful that the irony created by this alteration was intended. 22  Publication on this subject is vast, to name but a few references: Beauvoir, The Second Sex. (Trans. H.M. Parshley, introduction Margaret Crosland) (New York: Knopf, 1993) [1949]; Lieberman, “ ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale”, College English 34.3 (1972) 383–395; Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: Penguin, 1974); Stone, “Things Walt Disney Never Told Us”, The Journal of American Folklore 88.347 (1975) 42–50; Zipes, Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1986); Segal, “Who Said Romance Was Dead?” The Guardian (January 27, 2008) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/ jan/27/fiction.features1 (accessed 31st October 2016); Quilliam, “ ‘He seized her in his manly arms and bent his lips to hers …’ The Surprising Impact that Romantic Novels Have on Our Work”, Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care 37.3 (2011) 179–181.

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(68). In accordance with Apuleius’ text, here too Eros fell in love because accidently he had pierced himself with one of his arrows (14). However, lest the reader questions the feelings of the god of love the narratrix emphasizes that his love for Psyche is also true love: “While his magical arrows had sparked his passion, his time with Psyche had created pure and undeniable love” (55). Furthermore, when Eros realizes that Psyche is in mortal danger he breaks loose from his prison demonstrating that: “love cannot be imprisoned” (76). The message of true love and the interpretation of the ancient tale as a story about true love is reinforced at the ending by the moral the narratrix suggests to her pupil (and thus to the reader): “The ultimate goal—of any person—is to find true love. But true love cannot be found. It has to be forged […] It is easy to fall in love with someone when things are perfect, but true love is formed through adversity […]” (82, 83). The romantic reading of the ancient tale is already suggested in the title: The Love of Eros and Psyche. The idea that in order to maintain true love a couple should cleave to one another in hardship as well as in happiness is also suggested by the image on the cover of the book. The image is a clear reference to William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s painting “The Abduction of Psyche” (1895) which depicts Psyche in the arms of her lover ascending together to heaven.23 This message is underlined towards the end of the tale. After Eros saves Psyche who had failed in her last trial, he says to her: “Let us finish it together” (78). This re-telling is also making use of the theme of redemption and the malerescuer archetype which are fundamental traits of the romantic tradition of “true love”.24 Moreover, it is the Christian figure of the savior that is incorporated into the romantic illustration of the male-rescuer, both by word and by image. On his first appearance the figure of Eros is illustrated surrounded by rays of light (11).25 Then, when Eros secretly sends the desperate Psyche help, in the form of an eagle, the narratrix comments: “Her saviour came to her on swift wings” (64), resonating more clearly Psalm 18. Psyche’s inner response 23  See the painting in Wissman, Bouguereau (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1996) 92 (plate 60). Wissman comments: “The appeal of an image like Le ravissement de Psyché (1895; Plate 60) is the same as the enduring romance of a young girl’s fairy-tale dream of being carried off by a knight on a white horse, or of the impetus that fuels the continuing sales of novels of ravishment” (ibid., 94). 24  I am following here the terms used by Carolina Fernández Rodríguez, “The Deconstruction of the Male-Rescuer Archetype in Contemporary Feminist Revisions of ‘The Sleep‑ ing Beauty’”, Marvels & Tales (2002) 51–70. Although Rodríguez focus is on “The Sleeping Beauty”, her thesis is applicable for other traditional “romantic tales”. 25  In Christian iconography images of God associated with rays of light are influenced by John 8:12, 12:46 (see Didron, Christian Iconography: The History of Christian Art in the Middle Ages. Vol. I. (trans. E.J. Millington) (London: Bohn, 1851)).

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to her unexpected delivery, “ask and you shall receive” (64) is also resonant of a sacred Christian text (compare: Matthew 7:7). Thus, the image of Eros ascending to heaven carrying Psyche in his arms (77), has its roots in two different traditions: that of the romantic concept of earthly true love (the male-rescuer saving his helpless damsel in distress), and that which stems from a religious belief and allegorical concept regarding the heavenly source of the human soul and the trust one must put in the Almighty. The two sources blend once more in the wedding declaration made by Zeus: “What these two have created let no man—or god—tear asunder” (79). The traditional conclusion of a true love story—marriage—is pronounced according to the Christian formula. Foley and Banerjee then interpreted the ancient tale as a traditional true love story with Christian undertones. Accordingly, here too, the sexual content is limited and cleansed. For example, Zeus’ verbal agreement to help Eros, was purified of any impropriety found in Apuleius (78). When Psyche refers to Eros’ physic it is indeed suggestive but inconclusive with regard to the exact sexual implications: “I have run my fingers through his hair. His muscles are as solid as marble, and as smooth as silk” (39). In this re-telling too Psyche does not get pregnant during her time at Eros’ palace, a fact which also contributes to the assumption that their physical contact never amounted to full consummation. This is also true of the nuptial night. There is no clear indication that the couple had indeed sex on their first night together, in other words that they did become “one flesh”. Unlike the hasty god of Apuleius who came to conquer and not to talk, this Eros begins the relationship by communicating to her his longing. Next, we see them standing together under a starry night (29). The setting is no doubt a cliché but against the ancient tale there is something new here: through the symmetry in their appearances they are presented as almost equal to one another. In effect, this symmetry serves as a manipulative visual devise which helps the artist to blur the power imbalance between the two figures. The visual symmetry makes it easy to forget that one is a free master whilst the other is a vulnerable prisoner. The next two panels bring us to the morning. Alone in bed and fully dressed Psyche awakes, feeling “Waves of happiness […] She had never been more content” (30). Whether an adult reader suspects her contentment and waves of happiness to be associated with sexual satisfaction or not is beside the point. The writer and the artist were careful not to include any explicit sign of sexual consummation. The technique of drawing silhouettes, used again in the following pages, is indeed becoming suggestive of sexual tension—however not even a shared kiss is described either in word or image. A justification is also given to Eros’ secrecy and insistence on darkness: “He wanted her to love his soul before she loved his appearance” (30). Whilst the source for Psyche’s

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happiness, following the nuptial night, remains elusive, it is obvious that the contemporary creators designed her first encounter with Eros in terms that will not suggest any trauma or violation. By creating a romantic reading of the ancient tale the accusation of force is significantly diminished and the possibility of reading it as a rape is completely dismissed. Psyche & Eros: The Lady and the Monster, by Marie P Croall and artist Ron Randall (2010) is also an adaptation in the comics genre. While the image on the cover of Stolen Hearts suggests a love story—the graphics of the cover of Croall and Randall’s re-telling suggests a traditional comics’ action heroes’ story: Eros and Psyche with expressions of determination on their faces seem to be on the run, above them like a tornado column rises the figure of the angry Aphrodite, behind her wind swirls and lightning blazes. Croall and Randall’s Psyche, even if not a super-heroine like Wonder Woman, is an active and resilient heroine ready to try and do her best to succeed in the impossible tasks she is given by her adversary.26 Nonetheless, in spite of its feminist orientation this re-telling is also a romantic interpretation of the story on the one hand, and a “sexually clean” re-telling on the other hand. Psyche’s fears and uncertainty are not ignored. Sitting alone on the top of the mountain awaiting her monster-husband’s advance, the first hint of his appearance is an alarming black shadow (17). Turning to the next page it is revealed to be the shadow of the descending Zephyrus, her husbands’ good natured messenger (18). Yet at this point in the narrative, the black shadow illustrates not only the physical advancing of the messenger but also Psyche’s inner dreads. Correspondingly, her images in the panels that describe her first 26  In Apuleius’ text the relationship between Venus and Psyche is defined by the nouns domina (mistress) and ancilla (slave) (for an analysis of this aspect, see: Papaioannou (1998) 321). Facing the tasks given to her by her vengeful mistress, Apuleius’ Psyche exhibits helplessness and passivity. In comparison, in Craft and Craft’s re-telling it is Psyche’s resourcefulness and kindness which brings her assistants able to help her accomplish the tasks. In Foley and Banerjee’s re-telling Psyche is learning, to a degree, to overcome her submissiveness. Thus, if on the second trial-task her only solution to the difficulties she was faced with was the idea of committing suicide (59; much like the “original Psyche”), in her last trial (descending to the underworld) on hearing the story of Heracles’ successful visit to Hades’ realm and his safe return to the world of the living, she keeps encouraging herself: “If he [Heracles] can do it, so can I”(69). For a different view, according to which Apuleius’ Psyche is an active heroine see: Bottigheimer, “Cupid and Psyche vs. Beauty and the Beast: The Milesian and the Modern”, Merveilles & Contes 3.1 (1989) 9; Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997) 76 (comparing her to similar heroines of later fairy tales, Bacchilega identifies Psyche as courageous and determined, ibid., 77).

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night at her unknown husband’s palace do not convey a bride glowing with happiness (20–21). The coloring of the panels consists of heavy shades of blue and black, which correspond to the figure of Eros who emerges fully clad in a dark cloak, even his face is veiled. Psyche, laying on the bed her serious face meeting the reader’s gaze, is with her back to the approaching stranger. “I am your husband”, the hovering black figure tells her, “Do not be alarmed. But do not turn around” (20). The scene is one of mystery and suspense. Yet the only physical contact between the two of them is portrayed on the first panel of page 21: Eros’ hand is shown against Psyche’s face. Her eyes are shut, his fingers are holding a strand of her hair. The back of his hand may or may not be touching her cheek. Throughout the scene both stay fully clothed. This is also true of the next panels which illustrate the following nights (22–23). Although Eros may hold her shoulder or hug her from behind, there is not one image, not one word which suggests intercourse. Consequently in this re-telling too there are no mysterious voices comforting the new bride on her lost virginity and there is no pregnancy. The most explicit image occurs on the last page: after being rescued by Eros from a death like sleep (44) and receiving the blessings of Zeus to their marriage, the couple share a passionate hug and presumably an equally passionate kiss (45). But even in the very last panel, in which the reader can assume that the united couple are about to kiss again, no mention of an offspring is given. Instead, the writer uses a well-known formula to ensure the understanding that this is a love story: “… And she and Eros lived forever, happily together” (45). Here too the closure carries no hint that there was ever anything immoral or sexually abusive in the story. Verily, in this re-telling a statue of a sphynx is also subtly implanted. When Psyche’s father decides to consult with the oracle regarding the marriage prospects of his daughter, he is portrayed approaching the temple. Along the ascending pathway there are two statues, one on each side: to his left a lion, to his right a sphynx. As in Craft and Craft’s re-telling so here too the sphynx is a reminder of the Oedipus myth. However, this is a much more subtle reference and a far less sexual one since it is not sustained by any other hints, verbal or visual, in the panel. Here too it is very unlikely that a child reader will be aware of the possibility of sexual layers of meaning embedded in the image. 5 Conclusion Although sexual content in children’s literature is controversial in contemporary western societies, it is no longer taboo. Hence each individual re-teller is called upon to exercise his/her own considerations regarding the inclusion

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or exclusion of such materials which are found in the source text, as well as enriching his/her re-telling with new materials and/or references to other sources. The adaptations studied in this paper, mirror as well as reinforce an existing norm of sanitizing texts intended directly for children. Explicit sexual contents in the source text (Apuleius’) were not included in the adaptations. In the few instances a sexual content was included, either by word or image, it is in the form of an elusive suggestion, a well clothed hint—that in all probability would not be recognized by a young reader (thus turning it into a crossover text, intended both for children and adults). Furthermore the contemporary re-tellers, who are following the literal level of the source text, have enhanced but at the same time have significantly narrowed the tale’s scope by turning it into a romantic love story in the popular sense of the word.27 To adopt, somewhat freely, Paul Veyne argument (he was considering whether Greek children believed the tales told to them by their nurses), our contemporary re-tellers have turned into Greek nurses: [w]hich myths did nurses tell children? They certainly spoke to them of the gods, for piety and superstition required it. They frightened them with boogymen and Lamias; they told them sentimental stories about Ariadne or Psyche for their own amusement, and they wept. emphasis is mine, 43

Even incorporating Christian elements into the adaptation (Foley and Banerjee), or transforming the heroine into a more resourceful and determined one (to a different degree in all three adaptations), does not suggest a new paradigm. Rather, all three adaptations comply with the popular notion of romantic love, in itself promoting the traditional idea that marriage is the goal of woman’s life.28 27  In the introduction to The 100 Best Romance Novels, the editors presented the four criterions for a book to be included in their list. The first two are: “1. Whatever else happens, the novel must focus on the development of the love relationship between the main characters in the book. If the main point of the book is the heroine completing her personal journey, we love that, but it’s not a romance. If she completes her personal journey in the context of a romantic relationship, then that’s romance. 2. There must be an emotional payoff for the reader—in the form of a satisfying happily ever after.” (Lawler, The 100 Best Romance Novels: From Pride and Prejudice to Twilight, Books to Fall in Love—and Lust— with (Avon, Mass: Adamsmedia, 2013) 14). 28  In light of Adrienne Rich’s argument regarding compulsory heterosexuality (according to which women are forced and channeled towards heterosexual coupling, see: Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existance”, in Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and

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From this perspective two alterations are especially telling. In Apuleius’ text the ironic fact that Cupid was conquered by his own weapon and that it happened before Psyche was brought to his palace (V.24.4), is withheld both from the reader and Psyche until the moment Cupid abandons her (ibid). Conversely, in the adaptations this information is communicated to the reader before Psyche is carried to Cupid’s palace. Thus, while in Apuleius’ text the information withheld is a narrative manipulation designated to create curiosity and suspense (see Papaioannou 315), the alteration in the adaptations enhances the idea that this is, from the very beginning, a story about love. As for the other significant alteration: in Apuleius’ text Cupid comes to the rescue only at the very end, after Psych returns from the underworld and curiosity gets the better of her (VI.21.2–4).29 Conversely, in the adaptations, Cupid assists Psyche to fulfil her various tasks, it is especially emphasized in the comics’ adaptations. In Croall and Randall, already in the first task the ant hints at that by telling Psyche that a good friend had asked them to help her (35). Once again it will be hinted on the second task (39), and finally on her last task we are told that “Eros had been watching over her” (44). In Foley and Banerjee, Psyche suspects as much and articulates it upon completing her first task (56). As a fact it is reveled to the reader after the completion of the second task (62), and it is reenacted before the third one is introduced (ibid). In Craft and Craft, Psyche faces three tasks. On the first two the ill Cupid is absent. However, on her last task Cupid has recovered and he is the one guiding her on how to perform it. Moreover, he is also the one who provides her with what she will need in the underworld—“two gold coins and six honey cakes” (n.p). In Apuleius’ text it was the tower that took pity on her and gave her the needed instructions and warnings and it was Psyche who supplied herself with the coins and the cakes (VI.17–20.1). As with the first alteration here too the change contributes to the idea that this is a story about love. Hurt as he may be Cupid wants nothing more than to help his beloved one. Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (New York: Norton, 1986) 23–75), one may point to the fact that the re-tellers also do not challenge the very idea that Psyche’s desire and affinity may lie in a different direction (queer heroines and queer families do exist in contemporary western children’s literature). 29  Kenney interprets several allusions in the tale as a clear indication that Cupid is responsible for the help Psyche receives with each task (e.g. the narratrix statement that the ant helped Psych because she is Cupid’s wife [VI.10.5], Venus accusation insinuating that Psyche is being helped by Cupid [VI.11.2]), see: Apuleius, Cupid 14, 203. However, it should be noted that in the text itself there is no conclusive affirmation sustaining this interpretation.

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Clearing out the explicit sexual language and descriptions along with translating the myth into a romantic love story—obscures or even eliminates the possibility of interpreting the tale as one about sexual abuse. An interpretation very much called for if the myth is read according to its literal level. But even if the contemporary re-tellers choose to erase from the tale an element which they judged to be harmful to a young audience—we are still left with a tale about a girl/young woman who is being forced into a relationship, and a happy ending which reinforces the idea that this course of action is appropriate and justified. Perhaps it is time for a subversive adaptation for children, which instead of “cleaning” the myth will bravely and sensitively address it. With any luck some adults will read it too. Bibliography Apuleius, Cupid & Psyche (ed. E.J. Kenney [Including Introduction and Commentary]) (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). Apuleius, The Golden Ass: Or, A Book of Changes (trans. Joel C. Relihan) (India­napolis: Hackett, 2007). Aristotle, Poetics (trans. Anthony Kenny [Including Introduction and Notes]) (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013). Bacchilega, Cristina, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997). Balme, M.G. and J.H.W. Morwood, Cupid and Psyche: An Adaptation from The Golden Ass of Apuleius (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976). Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex (trans. H.M. Parshley) (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956). Beckett, Sandra L., Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2009). Blume, Judy, Forever. (New York: Atheneum, 1975). Boccaccio, Giovanni, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods [bilingual ed.] (ed. and trans. Jon Solomon) (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2011). Booth, David, “Censorship” in Philip Nel and Lissa Paul (eds.), Keywords for Children’s Literature (New York: NYU Press, 2011) 26–30. Bottigheimer, Ruth B., “Cupid and Psyche vs. Beauty and the Beast: The Milesian and the Modern”, Merveilles & Contes 3.1 (1989) 4–14. Craft, Charlotte M., Cupid and Psyche (illustrated by K.Y. Craft) (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). Croft, A.M., Fabulae Antiquae (London: Bell, 1939) [1918].

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Croall, Marie P., Psyche & Eros: The Lady and the Monster (illustrated by Ron Randall) (London: Lerner Books, 2010). Didron, Adolphe Napoléon, Christian Iconography: The History of Christian Art in the Middle Ages (Vol. I. Trans. E.J. Millington) (London: Bohn, 1851). Dodds, E.R., “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex”, in Erich Segal (ed.), Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York: Harper, 1983 [1966]) 177–188. Dworkin, Andrea, Woman Hating (New York: Penguin, 1974). Foerstel, Herbert N., Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2006). Foley, Ryan, Stolen Hearts: The Love of Eros and Psyche (illustrated by Sankha Banerjee) (New Delhi: Kalyani Navyug Media, 2009). Gilligan, Carol, The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love (New York: Vintage, 2003). Goddu, Krystyna Poray, “Where The Wild Things Really Are: Sex and Violence in Children’s Literature”, Publishers Weekly (May 6, 2014) (accessed December 07, 2016). Handley, E.W., “Comedy”, in P.E. Easterling and Bernard M.W. Knox (eds.), The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 1, Greek Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 355–425. Harris, Robie H., It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health (4th edn.) (illustrated by Michael Emberley) (Somerville, Mass: Candlewick, 2014) [1994]. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (Illustrated by Walter Crane) (Boston: Houghton, 1893) [1851]. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Tanglewood Tales (Illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett) (Philadelphia: Penn, 1921) [1853]. Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006). Hyde, Lilian Stoughton, Favorite Greek Myths (Chapel Hill: Yesterday’s Classics, 2010) [1904]. Kingsley, Charles, The Heroes: Or, Greek Fairy Tales For My Children (illustrated by M.H. Squire and E. Mars) (New York: Russell, 1901) [1856]. Lawler, Jennifer [and the Editors of Crimson Romance], The 100 Best Romance Novels: From Pride and Prejudice to Twilight, Books to Fall in Love—and Lust—with (Avon, Mass: Adamsmedia, 2013). Lieberman, Marcia R., “ ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale”, College English 34.3 (1972) 383–395. McClure, Amy, “Censorship”, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 8.1 (1983) 22–25. Nyberg, Amy Kiste, Seal of Approval: The Origins and History of the Comics Code (Jackson, MI: UP of Mississippi, 1998).

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Nyberg, Amy Kiste, “How Librarians Learned to Love the Graphic Novel”, in Robert G. Weiner (ed.), Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries and Archives: Essays on Readers, Research, History, and Cataloging (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010) 26–40. Papaioannou, Sophia, “Charite’s Rape, Psyche on the Rock and the Parallel Function of Marriage in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses”, Mnemosyne 51.3 (1998) 302–324. Paul, Lissa, “Sex and the Children’s Book”, The Lion and the Unicorn 29.2 (2005) 222–235. Phillips, Marie, Gods Behaving Badly (London: Vintage, 2007). Postman, Neil, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Vintage Books, 1982). Quilliam, Susan, “ ‘He seized her in his manly arms and bent his lips to hers …’. The Surprising Impact that Romantic Novels Have on Our Work”, Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care 37.3 (2011) 179–181. Relihan, Joel C., “Introduction”, in Apuleius, The Golden Ass: Or, A Book of Changes (trans. Joel C. Relihan) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007). Rich, Adrienne, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existance”, in Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (New York: Norton, 1986) 23–75. Ritchie, Francis, Fabulae Faciles: A First Latin Reader (London: Rivingtons, 1884). Reynolds, Kimberley, Children’s Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011). Reynolds, Kimberley, Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2007). Rodriguez, Carolina Fernández, “The Deconstruction of the Male-Rescuer Archetype in Contemporary Feminist Revisions of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ ”, Marvels & Tales (2002) 51–70. Segal, Francesca, “Who Said Romance Was Dead?” The Guardian, January 27, 2008 h t t p s://w w w.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/27/fiction.features1 (accessed 31st October 2016). Shavit, Zohar, Poetics of Children’s Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). Stone, Kay, “Things Walt Disney Never Told Us”, The Journal of American Folklore 88.347 (1975) 42–50. Swift, L.A., “Sexual and Familial Distortion in Euripides’ Phoenissae”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 139 (2009) 53–87. Tillyard, E.M.W., The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Peregrine Books, 1963). Veyne, Paul, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (trans. Paula Wissing) (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) [1983]. Wertham, Fredric, “It’s Still Murder: What Parents Still Don’t Know About Comic Books”, The Saturday Review (09 April, 1955) 11–12, 46–48. Wissman, Fronia E., Bouguereau (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1996).

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Wolk, Douglas, “R.I.P.: The Comics Code Authority”, TIME.com. (24 January 2011) http://techland.time.com/2011/01/24/r-i-p-the-comics-code-authority/ (accessed 02 Febuary 2016). Zipes, Jack, Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1986).

Part 4 Rewriting Jews and Christians in the Ancient World

∵

CHAPTER 10

Sadducee and Pharisee in “The Antagonists” by E.K. Gann Haim Perlmutter 1 Introduction The Antagonists by Ernest Gann is a historical novel first published by Simon and Shuster in 1970, about the Jewish rebel resistance and suicide in Masada.1 The novel presents the “antagonists”: Elazar, ben Yair, leader of the rebels who held Masada, and Flavius Silva, general of the Roman tenth legion and subsequently governor of Judaea.2 The book, based on the account of the siege as told by Josephus Flavius in his work “The Jewish War”, and on the archaeological findings discovered at the site of Masada by Yigael Yadin in the 1960s,3 had limited circulation, and can now be found only in libraries.4 1  The novel had only three printings. It was reprinted in 1971 (Penguin), and subsequently in 1980 under the name Masada (Penguin). The latest printing followed the television series and was named after it. See below comment 4. 2  That is the source of the name. At the end of the novel Silva states that Elazar leader of the rebels was “his antagonist” (287). Flavius Silva is mentioned explicitly by Josephus (BJ 7:258–260) as the governor general of Judaea who was in charge of the Masada siege. 3  On the siege its process and duration see Shaye J.D. Cohen, “Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus”, JJS 33 (1982) 385–405; Hanna M. Cotton, “The date of the fall of Masada: the evidence of the Masada papyri”, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 78 (1989) 157–162. Jonathan P. Roth, “The Length of the Siege of Masada”, Scripta Classica Israelica 14 (1995) 87–109; Steven Mason, “Essenes and Lurking Spartans in Josephus’s Judean War: From Story to History”, in Zuleika Rodgers (ed.), Making History: Josephus and the Historical Method, (Leiden: Brill, 2007) 219–261; Duncan B. Campbell, “Capturing a desert fortress: Flavius Silva and the siege of Masada”,  Ancient Warfare 4. 2 (2010) 28–35. 4  The television series of the BBC “Masada” had much more impact than the original novel. It was written by Gann as well and the plot was updated and made more complex. See: Masada, Boris Sagal (dir.), (Arnon Milchan Productions, Universal TV, 1981). On the movie version see Lisa Maurice, “Swords, Sandals and Prayer Shawls: Depicting Jews and Romans on the Silver Screen”, in David Schaps, Daniela Dueck and Uri Yiftach (eds.), When the First Western Empire Met the Near East, Graeca Tergestina, Storia e Civiltà (Edizioni: Università di Trieste, 2016) 310–321.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004346383_012

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Though the book focuses primarily on the two leaders and the conflict between them, the narrative also describes a number of other colorful characters at Masada during the siege. This paper focuses on two of those secondary figures who represent different religious sects that existed in Judaea at that time: Zidon the Pharisee, and Ezra the Sadducee. I shall demonstrate that the author’s description of these sects was the result of a desire to compare the past to the present, by portraying the sects as similar to contemporary components of Israeli society at his time. His view of Israeli society was largely shaped by a trend of the time, called by researchers “The Masada Myth”, which glorified the rebels of Masada, and compared them to the soldiers of the fledgling Jewish state that was struggling against adversaries more numerous, powerful, equipped and wealthy in comparison.5 In addition I argue that the author wished to depict the Sadducee sect as comparable to the modern Zionist movement—loyal to the bible but free from rabbinic restrictions. The Pharisee, on the other hand, represents that typical exilic Jew. These claims will be substantiated by a comparison of the description of the sects as portrayed by Josephus, the New Testament and rabbinic sources, with the image of the representatives of the sects in the novel, and examining how the main characters of the novel—the Roman governor Flavius Silva, and rebel leader Elazar ben Yair—relate to the members of the sects. Understanding the historic background in which the book was written will help understand the motivation and attitude of the author. 1.1 A Unique Novel in the Works of E. Gann Ernest K. Gann, the author, (1910–1990), was a professional writer who wrote several best-selling novels and screenplays. His prime interests were aviation, boating and adventure, hardly religious issues. The Antaagonists was the only book he wrote dealing with pre-modern history and the only one connected primarily to Jews. It was first published in 1970, four years after the six day war, in which Israel fought simultaneously against three countries: Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. It also follows the discoveries of the Dead Sea scrolls in Masada and Qumran by Yigael Yadin and his successors. It seems likely that these events 5  On the “Masada myth” and it’s distortion of history, see Nachman Ben Yehudah, The Masada Myth, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). The entire book is devoted to this issue. See also Barry Schwartz, Yael Zerubavel, and Bernice M. Barnett, “The Recovery Of Masada: A Study In Collective Memory”, The Sociological Quarterly 27.2 (1986) 147–164; Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

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had a great impact on the author who devoted his only historical novel to the story of Masada.6 1.2 Testimony of the Author: His Goal in this work: An Authentic Work In his introduction Gann writes: I have been meticulously careful to insure authenticity throughout this book. Many facts were available although nowhere near the quantity found in the usual research of a historical event. So if I erred, it is not for the want of trying. The works of Josephus were of course of inestimable value, but unfortunately he was not personally present to report the siege of Masada. The magnificent works and archeological research plus the vicarious inspiration of Yigael Yadin, affected this writing more than any other single force. From his discoveries I contrived this story.7 The author declares that he is very careful to write the book authentically. However he also alludes to the deciding influence of the work of Yigael Yadin on the novel. He implies that Josephus “was not personally present to report the siege of Masada”, indicating his reservations about Josephus’s description of the rebels and their conduct, despite the fact that Josephus is the only contemporary literary source for the events. In this paper, I will demonstrate that, more than the author wished to portray the events as they had happened, he was overcome by the spirit of the 6  In the more distant history the author may have had interest in the Jewish plight as he himself fled from Germany when working for Time magazine on a documentary series. During WWII he worked as a commercial pilot and volunteered to help fly the American troops aiding the English war effort. In his biographies I did not find reference to religious practice and it therefore seems he was not religious. See Times Staff, “Author Ernest Gann, 81 Enjoyed His Second Career as A Painter”, The Seattle Times (December 1991). Gann was not the first to write a novel based on the story of Masada. Yitzchak Lamdan wrote a book-length poem titled “Masada” (Tel Aviv: Heidim, 1927) which contains the famous lines: “Ascend, chain of the dance / Never again shall Masada fall”; Joseph Klausner wrote a pamphlet for youth, “Masada and its Heroes”, Lanoar 62, Tel Aviv: Omanut, 3 (1933) (Hebrew). Yosef Braslowski wrote two novels on the subject, When Masada Fell (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1941), (Hebrew), and Masada (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1944) (Hebrew). Gann’s novel is unique in that it was the first one written in light of Yadin’s archaeological discoveries on the mountain, and that it was written by a non-Israeli, and a non-Jew, in English. 7  The Antagonists 7. Yigael Yadin’s report is known primarily from the popular book Masada (London and New York: Random House, 1966).

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time in which the book was written. It will be shown that the historiography that is based on the testimony of literary sources of the period portrays the story of Masada, and especially the sects of Jews that were represented there (or not), in quite a different light than is seen in the book. While it is possible to claim that the unfavourable literary description of the rebels is one sided and disputable, it is hard to justify the disregard of the literary description of the sects of Sadducees and Pharisees of the period. Nor is it possible to ignore the striking resemblance between the author’s description of the Sadducees and modern Zionist secular Jews, and that of the Pharisees and the stereotypical diaspora orthodox Jew. 1.3 “The Masada Myth” The “Masada Myth” developed in Zionist circles from the third decade of the twentieth century.8 It depicted the defenders of Masada as heroes and freedom fighters, who could be an inspiration for the Zionist movement. It presented their collective suicide reported by Josephus as an extreme measure taken by the defenders to avoid slavery, and shows their devotion to the national cause. On the other hand, the perpetrators of this myth rejected Josephus’s claim that the zealots of Masada had murdered Jews in Jerusalem who were suspected of collaboration with the Romans, and had attacked and massacred the Jews of Ein Gedi.9 They claimed that Josephus was lying and that his purpose was to slander the rebels and justify his surrender and collaboration with the Romans.10 This attitude to the rebels can be seen in the brief words of Yadin in the introduction to his work on the Masada expedition:

8   As seen above. See Ben Yehudah (1995), 232–233. He points out that the myth was developed as early as World War Two: when the German general Rommel was in North Africa, intending to invade Palestine, the local Zionists planned that in that case they would create a “Masada” on Mt. Carmel and fight to the last man. 9    B J 2: 264; 2:447; 4:391; 7: 259. 10  On Josephus’s bias against the Jewish revolutionaries see Martin Hengel, The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I until 70 AD (Tamp: T&T Clark Ltd, 1989); Morton Smith, “Sicarii, Zealots and Sicarii: Their Origins and Relation”, The Harvard Theological Review 64. 1 (1971) 1–19, reprinted in Shaye J. D. Chone (ed.), Studies in the Cult of Yahawe (Shaye J.D. Cohen ed.), (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1995) 211–226. U. Rappaport, “Josephus’ personality and the credibility of his narrative”, in Zuleika Rodgers, Making History: Josephus and Historical Method (Leiden: Brill, 2006) 68–81.

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I considered myself rather privileged because Masada is not really just another archaeological site. For many of us it is sort of a mausoleum of the nation’s martyrs.11 Yadin had been the second chief of staff of the Israeli Army and head of the school of Archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was asked in 1963 by the IES (Israel Exploration Society) to lead an expedition, whose aim was to excavate the archaeological remains on Masada.12 The reason for this initiative was that the early state of Israel identified with the Masada legend, seeing it as a basis for the concept of giving one’s life for the sake of the freedom of the Jewish people in its land.13 Yadin’s archaeological finds caused much excitement. He discovered physical remains of the Jewish defenders of the site, uncovered the fabulous buildings that Herod had built there, and was impressed by the cultural difference between the splendor of the Roman sponsored King Herod, and the puritan material culture of the zealots.14 For about twenty years, the Israeli army brought soldiers from basic training to be sworn in at Masada, and in the background there would be an inscription of fire stating, “Masada should not Fall Again”.15 Rabbi Shlomo Goren, who was chief rabbi of the army at the time, 11  Yigael Yadin, “Masada and the Zealots’ Last Stand”, in J.F. Hall, J.W. Welch (eds.), Masada and the World of the New Testament, (Provo Utah: BYU Press, 1997) 18. However Shmaria Guttman himself, the instigator of the Masada myth, reports that Yadin refused at first to take on the Masada archaeological expedition but after persuasion he was convinced. See Ben Yehudah (1995) 52, 59, 81, 190, and 250. 12  See Yadin (1966) 13. 13  Nachman Ben Yehudah (1995), 234–235 suggests that Masada became an inspiration for the Zionist movement of the time because the myth could be attached to a particular site that had physical remains that told the story. The physical remoteness of the location added to the romantic atmosphere, and the trek up the mountain coincided with the message of resilience that the promoters of the myth wanted to instill. It can be added that these conditions are also true regarding the western wall and Jerusalem of pre-state Israel. However, whereas the zealots’ stand in Jerusalem involves the holy temple which had much religious meaning, the stand in Masada can be given a pure secular interpretation. The zealots were fighting for their freedom from Roman oppression. In addition, after the war of independence of 1948, the old city of Jerusalem came under Jordanian rule and was not accessible until 1967. In this period Masada was a good alternative for conducting ceremonies conducive to devotion to the Zionist cause. 14  Yadin (1966) 54. 15  In the movie version the opening scene is a swearing in of Israeli soldiers on Masada. See Lisa Maurice, “Jews and Judaism in Rome”, in Monica Cyrino, Rome, Season Two: Trial and Triumph (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) 99.

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brought the skeletons found on the mountain to burial with full military honors. Indeed, in an essay of Jewish religious law, he justified the suicide of the zealots at Masada as the only way to defy the totalitarian rule of the Romans.16 Opposed to his opinion was Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neriah, founder of Bnei Akiva Yeshivot, who stated that there is no justification for a Jew to take his own life and that of others and that bondage is preferable to death.17 Indeed in later years the swearing in ceremony was moved to the Western Wall, in order to avoid educating the young soldiers with the doctrine of suicide to prevent capture.18 The historian Luis Feldman said of this: No single event in the history of the second temple commonwealth has occasioned more discussion in recent years than the fall of Masada, the mausoleum of martyrs as it has been called.… Our age which has seen the sprouting of radicals and terrorists in so many nations, is understandably more interested in the radical terrorists who held out for so long at Masada against the mighty forces of Rome. The spectacular discoveries in the excavations by Yadin in a nation where digging is a veritable form of prayer has made Masada a shrine for the Jewish people”.19 16  Rabbi Goren and Rabbi Neriah’s opinion is especially relevant to this discussion because they were the prominent religious Zionist spiritual and educational leaders who related to this subject. It is not surprising that non Zionistic rabbis objected to the suicide as they did not see any virtue in Jewish independence. In addition it is important to note that Rabbi Goren was the army chief rabbi when the army decided to swear in soldiers at the Masada site. 17  Rabbi M.Z. Neriah, “Hitabdutam shel Anshei Metzada Bahalakha”, in idem, Tznif Melucha (Kfar Haroeh: Khai Ro’I, 1992) 196–198. Regarding academic discussion of the suicide at Masada, see also David J. Ladouceur, “Josephus and Masada”, in Louis H. Feldman and Gōhei Hata (eds.), Josephus, Judaism and Christianity, (Leiden: Brill 1987) 95–114; Arthur J. Droge, James D. Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (San Francisco: HarperCollin 1992) 20–21, 53–85, 113–129; Mark Andrew Brighton, The Sicarii in Josephus’s Judean War: rhetorical analysis and historical observations, (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literatre, 2009) 107–131; Jan W. Van Henten, “Martyrion and Martyrdom: Some Remarks about Noble Death in Josephus”, in F. Siegert and J. Kalms (eds.), Internationales Josephus—Kolloquium Brüssel 1998 (Münster: Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum, 1999) 124–141; Uriel Rappaport, “Who Were the Sicarii?”, in Mladen Popović (ed.), The Jewish Revolt Against Rome: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011) 323–343. 18  On the removal of the army swearing in from Masada to the Kotel and Latrun, see Ben Yehudah (1995) 159–162. 19  Louis H. Feldman, Josephus and Modern Scholarship 1937–1980 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984) 764–765. See also, Idem, “Masada: A Critique of Recent Scholarship”, in Jacob Neusner

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However, the identification with the myth of Masada was controversial even in mainstream Zionistic circles. When Shmaria Guttman hiked to the site in 1933, and went to tell Yitzchak Ben Zvi, the head of the Jewish National Committee, about his experience, Ben Zvi said to him: Tell me Shmaria: Why are you so excited? Nine hundred Jewish robbers ran from Jerusalem to Masada and committed suicide.20 So what?21 When he discussed it with David Ben Gurion, the leader of the Zionist movement and first prime minister of Israel, Ben Gurion also questioned the wisdom of educating the youth to suicide. To this Guttman answered, downplaying the suicidal element of the Masada saga: I wanted to bring ourselves, the young adolescents to the point where they would have the willingness to fight to the end. Not to die, but to fight to the end.22 Despite the opposition from the establishment Guttman managed to instill the Masada myth in the youth movements, and subsequently in the military establishment. He started by giving seminars on the site. The future leadership of Israel took part in these seminars and internalized the message he gave. This

(ed.), Christianity, Judaism, and Other Greco-Roman Cults, Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty, (Leiden: Brill 1975) 218–248. 20  Ben Zvi’s accusation that the rebels in Masada were bandits is based on Josephus Flavius, BJ 4.399–405, where Josephus claims that the rebels in Masada attacked the settlement of Ein Gedi and slaughtered the 700 inhabitants looting the town. Guttman claimed that in this case Josephus was lying. He claims that at the end of BJ when describing the stand on Masada Josephus tried to compensate by writing a sympathetic description of their stand. On this issue see also Robert A. Horsley, “The Sicarii: Ancient Jewish Terrorists”, Journal of Religion 59.4 (1979) 435–458; K.P. Jackson, “Revolutionaries in the First Century”, in John F. Hall and John W. Welch (eds.), Masada and the World of the New Testament (ProvoUtah: BYU) 130–132. 21  Menachem Shashar, “Shmarya Guttman: The Creator of Massada Myth and the Exposer of Gamla in the Golan and Susia on the Book Bamidbar”, Eretz 1 (1987) 24 (Hebrew). Y. Ben Zvi was to become the second President of Israel. He was interested in historical issues and the academic research institute “Yad Ben Zvi” is named after him. 22  Shmarya Guttman, “Historical Survey”, in Pinchas Hillman, Avraham Magen, Masada as an Educational Value: The Transcription of a Day of Deliberations on the Topic Dated October 31 1985 (Efal: Yad Tabenkin United Kibbutz Movement Press, 1986) 11.

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was especially effective since his first seminar was given when Rommel, the German General, was conquering North Africa during the Second World War.23 Ernest Gann identified strongly with the myth of Masada, and expanded the significance of the story to become a universal message of national patriotism.24 He wrote in his introduction the following: In these days of patriotic cynicism some readers may be inclined to disbelieve the behavior of the zealots of Masada. I direct the doubts of such unfortunates to more contemporary martyrs, and those of Hungary who defied Russian tanks with rocks, and those like the Czech Jan Palach, who chose to welcome the Russian invaders by self- immolation … Anyone who has convinced himself patriotism is dead has learned nothing from ancient history and does not know contemporary history.25 It is remarkable that Gann, faraway in America, felt he needed to join this story and to write about this myth. Nor was he alone. Yadin mentions two thousand volunteers that came from around the world to participate in the excavations in Masada that he led in the years 1963–1965. He explained their motivation as follows: … Masada represents for all of us in Israel and for many elsewhere, archaeologist and laymen, a symbol of courage, a monument to our great national figures, heroes who chose death over a life of physical and moral serfdom.26 The Masada Myth is a narrative that can be accepted or rejected. However, as will be shown below, when describing the inner sects of the zealots on the mountain Gann neglected to use all available material that could provide an authentic description and chose instead to continue the spirit of the Masada Myth, by identifying the religious sects of the second temple period with contemporary trends in Jewish and Israeli society. The Masada Myth thus caused a bias and distortion in the reception of the portrait of Jewish religious thought. 23  Ben Yehuda (1995) 73. 24  Lisa Maurice connects the image of the Israeli state in this production to the image of Israel in the eyes of American Jews. See Maurice (2016) 318–321. It can be noted that Gann had served as a pilot in the U.S. air force during WWII and this probably shaped his approach to patriotism and freedom fighting. 25  Gann, The Antagonists, 7. 26  Yadin (1966) 13.

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When writing the story of the rebels in Masada the author seems to be making an effort to describe the day to day life of the rebels, their beliefs, conduct and aspirations, but the picture that emerges is based on partial evidence and anachronistic interpretation. When the novel was written there were no literary or archaeological sources for the existence of both Pharisees and Sadducees on Masada at the time of the revolt. Indeed, Yadin found scrolls that are attributed to the Essenes at Masada, and scrolls of the bible that are identical to the text we have today, but did not mention Pharisees or Sadducees in his book.27 Gann places two central figures, one a Sadducee and one a Pharisee, as leaders together in Masada with Elazar ben Yair, himself a member of the Sicarii. 2

The Sadducee and Pharisee in Ancient Sources

There are three literary sources that describe the Sadducee and Pharisee sects. The New Testament is probably the most contemporary since its first books (“The Synoptic Gospels”) were compiled in the first century CE, around the time of the destruction of the second temple.28 The authors of the synoptic gospels might actually have been in Jerusalem prior to the destruction and seen the sects in action. Josephus wrote his works in the first years after the destruction though he himself was active prior to the destruction and could have met representatives of the sects.29 Rabbinic literature was compiled in the first centuries CE after the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE,30 27  On the various scrolls found in Masada see Yadin (1966) 168–180, 184–192. Yadin does posit that the Essenes were represented on Masada and participated in the revolt and suicide. See ibid., 220. Gann did insert the Essenes to the later BBC television series, giving them a central role. Ben Yehuda (1995) 59–61 argues that this is not accurate, but in this case the presence of the scrolls on the mountain support Yadin. On this, see Maurice (2016) 311. 28  On the compilation of the Synoptic Gospels there is vast literature. For some recent publications see Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Yale University Press, 1997) 25–95; Carson Donald A., Moo, Douglas J. and Moris Leon, An Introduction to the New Testament, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992) 19–61. 29  On the dating of Josephus’s works see Mary Smallwood, “Introduction” in G.A. Williamson (trans.), The Jewish War, (New York: Dorset Press, 1981), 7–18. 30  On redaction of the literature of the Tanaim see Herman L. Strack, Gunter Stemberger, Introduction to Talmud and Midrash (tr. M. Bockmuehl, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992) 149–156, 169–177, 269–273; Jacob Neusner, Introduction to Rabbinic Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1994) 97–98, 124–128, 130–131, 249–250, 271–272, 305–306, 328–329. A. Goldberg, “The Mishnah—A Study Book of Halakha”, in Safrai, S. (ed.), The Literature

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at a time when the sects of Sadducees and Pharisees no longer existed, although sources, memories, and quotes from before the destruction did survive. Despite the disappearance of the sect, the rabbis devoted much attention to the Sadducees, their opinions, and conduct. The attitude of the Sadducees to the Roman dominion in the years prior to the destruction is unclear. On one hand, the Hasmonean rebels against Rome starting with Alexander Janeas, his son Aristobolos II and grandsons, were close to the Sadducees, but in later times the Sadducees are high priests, very wealthy, and connected with the Roman rulers. The moderate high priest Ananus ben Ananus was a Sadducee.31 All the above sources agree that the primary distinction between Sadducee and Pharisee Judaism was ideology. The Sadducees denied the rabbinic oral tradition and did not believe in life after death, while the Pharisees believed in the oral Torah and in the resurrection of the dead and a future eternal existence. The New Testament evaluated the Sadducees and the Pharisees from a moral and social perspective and criticized both sects. Josephus related to the sects from a group psychological viewpoint as well, describing the popular aspect of the Pharisee movement, which was loved by the masses, while the Sadducees are described as proud, rigid, and elitist. Rabbinic sources elaborate also on disagreements between the sects concerning the rituals of the temple as well as other religious practices. It must be noted that since the Sadducees left no literature, what is known about the Sadducees comes exclusively from secondary sources rather than from members of the sect themselves. The picture, therefore, is probably distorted. Nevertheless contemporary sources are the only authentic way to picture the members of the sect. The synoptic gospels of the New Testament mention Jesus’s disputes with a rabbinic establishment in Jerusalem that was compiled primarily of Sadducees and Pharisees. Jesus argues with both sects. On the Sadducees it says:

of the Sages Vol 1, Chapter 4, (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1987), 211–262. Idem, “Tosefta”, in ibid., 283–301; Menachem Kahana, “Hallachic Exegesis”, in Ibid., Vol. 2, 3–105, esp. 60–64; idem, The tannaitic midrashim, in Stefan C. Reif (ed.), The Cambridge Geniza Collections, Their Contents and Significance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 59–73; David Kraemer, “The Mishnah”, in Steven T. Katz (ed.), CHJ (4 vols; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 4: 299–315; Paul D. Mandel, “Tosefta”, in Ibid., 316–335; Jay M. Harris, “Midrash Halacha”, in Idem 336–368. On the above see C. Fonrobert and M. Jaffee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 31   A J 20: 199.

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“Be careful”, Jesus said to them. “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”32 … Then they understood that he was not telling them to guard against the yeast used in bread, but against the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.33 Jesus seemingly objected equally to the teachings of both sects. Furthermore, the high priest who wanted to kill Jesus’ followers was Sadducee, while Gamliel the Pharisee objected to his execution.34 2.1 Josephus on the Pharisees and Sadducees Josephus is one of the main sources for research into the sects in the second temple that include the Sadducees and Pharisees.35 He mentions the Pharisees only eight times in his works and the Sadducees six, but he elaborates on them and explains their ideology extensively. He emphasizes the disagreement between the sects on life after death and free choice versus divine decree.36 On a personal note Josephus states that he himself tried the way of life of all the sects, and finally chose the way of the Pharisees.37 Nevertheless, according to Soldarini, “he certainly does not write as one [a Pharisee]”, since in his writings he does not praise the Pharisees or attribute to them more truth than the other sects. He merely states that the Pharisees are considered to be the most skilled 32  Matthew 16: 6. 33  Matthew 16: 11–12. 34  Acts 5: 17–39. On the place of the Sadducees in Jewish society prior to the destruction of the temple see Eyal Regev, “Flourishing Before the Crisis: Mapping Judaean Society in the First Century CE”, in Peter J. Tomson, Joshua Schwarts (eds.), Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: How to Write Their History, (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 53–55. 35  His extensive description of the sects is in BJ II: 125–165. Another source is AJ 13: 171. On his description of the sects, see Gunnar Haaland, “What Difference Does Philosophy Make? The Three Schools as a Rhetorical Device in Josephus”, in Zuleika Rodgers (ed.), Making History: Josephus and the Historical Method (Leiden: Brill 2007) 262–288. Jonathan Klawans, Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 144–210 and especially “Conclusion”, ibid., 210–222. 36  Anthony J. Saldarini, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society: A Sociological Approach (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2001) 79, claims that the reason the sects are not mentioned frequently is Josephus did not attribute much political importance to the sects. Nevertheless it is a partial picture. Though he mentions them in a small amount of places he devotes much space to them in the places that he mentions them. 37  Josephus, Life 12. There is much scholarship on Josephus and his description of the Pharisees. For a comprehensive survey see Steven Mason, Josephus and the Pharisees (Leiden: Brill, 2001), esp. 18–37. Regarding whether Josephus himself was a Pharisee, see there: Ibid., 325–376.

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interpreters of the Jewish law.38 Klawans disagrees and sees in Josephus’s writings a belief in free will and in life after death, as well as adherence to rabbinic law, all of which point to a Pharisee conviction.39 Haaland states that Josephus saw all three sects and especially the Essenes, as “model Jews” and therefore described them side by side within a single context, since the existence of philosophies in the Jewish world was, in the eyes of Josephus, a sign that the Jews were as cultured as the Greeks and Romans were.40 Josephus, after discussing the ideology of the various sects adds regarding the Sadducees: Again, Pharisees are friendly to one another and seek to promote with the general public, but Sadducees, Even towards each other they show a more disagreeable spirit, and in their relations with men like themselves they are as harsh as they might be to foreigners”.41 2.2 Sadducees and Pharisees in “The Antagonists” Gann portrays two individuals, who represent the Sadducees and Pharisees. His description shows how he received these schools of thought and translated their philosophies into literary characters. These characters are Zidon the Pharisee, and Ezra the Sadducee. The way in which Gann describes the Sadducee and Pharisee in The Antagonists goes beyond what can be found in the sources and sometimes contrary to the authentic image. He seems to be compromising authentic depiction as a result of influences of the spirit of the time in which he wrote the novel. 2.2.1

Zidon—The Pharisee42 There waited also Zidon the leader of the Pharisees, an indecisive man who could be very long of wind when engaged in avoiding facts. Like most Pharisees he momentarily expected an apocalypse and some said

38  Saldarini (2001) 111. 39  Klawans (2001) 210–212. 40  Haaland (2007) 269. 41   B J 2:165. 42  Zidon is the biblical name of the son of Canaan, son of Ham, son of Noah (Genesis 10: 15). It was later the name of a nation the “Zidonim” (Deut. 3: 9, Josh. 13: 4). It was also the name of a coastal city in the northwestern corner of the land of Canaan (Gen. 10: 19; Chron. 1:1: 13). It is mentioned in the El Amarna letters (71, 85; 20, 75) under the name Zidona. It is hardly a name that a typical Pharisee would choose for his son.

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he looked forward to it as a final cessation of his nerve wracking facial tick. As always these days he was wearing his phylactery and his talith the blue fringes placed at the corners according to the Law of Moses, and it being very broad and long in the style of the Pharisees.43 Zidon, “leader of the Pharisees” is described in a very negative light. His physical attribute in the form of a facial tick is reminiscent of anti-Semitic descriptions of Jews with physical blemishes.44 Zidon the Pharisee “avoids the facts” and is “indecisive”. He constantly wears a broad and long Talit (prayer shawl) and a single phylactery, a presentation that depicts him as a religious fanatic who is also pathetic, in that he is missing his second phylactery. Gann’s attitude to the Pharisees originated in the way they are presented in the New Testament,45 where Jesus is quoted as saying: Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.46

43   The Antagonists, p. 70. 44  On the physical image of the Jew in the eyes of the gentile see Gary F. Jenson, The Path of the Devil: Early Modern Witch Hunts (New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 156. On the image of the Jew in Nazi propaganda see Geoff Eley, “What are the Contexts for German Antisemitism: Some Thoughts on the Origins of Nazism”, in J. Frankel (ed.), The Fate of the European Jews 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 100–133. 45  I want to thank Professor David Schaps for pointing this out. 46  Matthew 23: 23. There is much criticism of the Pharisees in the NT. See many sources in John W. Bowker and John Bowker, Jesus and the Pharisees, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). For a breakdown of the Jesus’s criticism of the Pharisees in the various synoptic gospels see Martin Pickup, “Matthew’s and Mark’s Pharisees”, in Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton (eds.), In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Wako: Baylor University Press, 2007) 67–113; Amy Jill Levine, “Luke’s Pharisees”, in ibid., 113–131; Raimo Hakola and Adele Reinhartz, “John’s Pharisees”, ibid., 131–149. On Paul and the Pharisees, see Bruce Chilton, “Paul and the Pharisees”, ibid. 149–175. Recently there was presented a revolutionary opinion that Jesus actually sided with the Pharisees and was part of their movement. See: Hyam Maccoby, Jesus the Pharisee, (Norwich UK: SCM Press, 2003). There is an analysis that compares Jesus to the house of Hillel. See: Peter J. Tomson, “Jesus and his Judaism”, in Markus Bockmuehl (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 30–35. Later (p. 33) he compares him to a “Hasid” who differed from the Pharisees in some areas though he was essentially part of their world.

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It seems that Gann interpreted “hypocrisy” as indecision and lack of loyalty, and that is the base for his description.47 Elazar does not like Zidon and is happy to get rid of him when he decides to leave the mountain and give himself up to the Romans. He leads a party of Jews from Masasda who surrenders.48 Gann’s description of this event is based on rabbinic sources describing how Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai surrendered to the Romans during the siege on Jerusalem. Although the actual surrender and his acceptance by Vespasian is disputed in literature, it is agreed that at the same time that Elazar ben Yair continued the war against the Romans from his base in Masada, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai

47  The issue of indecisiveness of rabbis in the events that led to the outbreak of the revolution appears also in a legend cited by the BT Gittin 55b-56a. It tells how a Jew by the name of Bar Kamtza was embarrassed by another man named Kamtza, and as a result decided to tell the Romans that the Jews are rebelling. In order to prove this, Bar Kamtza tells the Romans to send an animal to the temple as a sacrifice of the Caesar. Bar Kamtza inflicts on the animal a subtle blemish which makes it unfit for sacrifice in the eyes of the Jews, but not in the eyes of non-Jews. When the animal was brought to the temple the priests debated whether they should sacrifice it so as not to offend the Emperor; but one sage Zekhariah ben Avkulas, refuses arguing that people would say that it was permissible to sacrifice blemished animals on the altar. The same sage objected to killing Bar Kamtza saying: “They will say that he who causes blemish to the sacrifices should be killed”. In the end they do nothing. Later sages in the BT (Gittin 56a), declared that the “modesty” (‫ (ענוותנותו‬of the sage caused the destruction of the temple. Indeed, Josephus disagrees with the analyzes of the BT states that it was Rabbi Zakhariah who stopped the sacrifice in memory of the Caesar deliberately because he was one of the rebels. See: BJ 4:224–225. It is possible that Gann saw this story in the Soncino translation of the BT. There the behavior of Rabbi Zechariah is described as: “scrupulousness”. Maurice Simon, “Tractate Gittin”, Soncino Babylonian Talmud, (London: Soncino Press, 1937) 56a. Interestingly, Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, The Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, (London: W.C. Luzak and co. and New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 1092, has a number of translations for the word but does not cite this source. Perhaps he was not sure himself how to translate the term in this case. 48  The desertion of Zidon and Ezra takes place in p. 73–78, 87–89. Interestingly, this scenario that some of the people in Masada surrendered was raised in recent research in order to explain why there were so few human remains found in the research of the site. See Cohen (1982) 394–395. He suggests that Josephus may have made up the suicide influenced by Roman literature that describes mass suicide in the context of conquest cities. See also: Menachem Stern, Greek and Latin authors on Jews and Judaism, Vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 1984), 385–386.

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was dedicated to trying to ensure the survival of Judaism in the form of Jewish law, by developing a Yeshiva in the town of Jamnia on the coastal plain.49 The inspiration of Gann to have the Pharisee dressed in a large four cornered garment could have come from the Babylonian Talmud that mentions three very rich men in Jerusalem who had enough provisions in storage to provide for the city in siege. One of them was “Ben Tzizit Hakeset” who wore an enormous Talit with fringes that were so long that four slaves had to carry pillows so they would not be dragged on the floor, a description that fits the dress of Zidon in the narrative, further pointing to the above Talmudic discourse.50 However, it could also be that he was inspired by seeing contemporary Hassidic Jews who dressed in the four cornered garment over their shirt and under their overcoats. It is quite clear from the description that Zidon is not a warrior. This corresponds very well with the Talmudic account of Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakai, (mentioned above), who left Jerusalem in order to surrender to the Romans, possibly because he objected to the revolt from the beginning.51 Gann clearly knew this story, for he mentions it explicitly in the dialogue between Ezra the Sadducee and Silva.52 This same Rabbi Yohanan mentions disputes he had with the Sadducees during the time the temple stood, concerning the proper 49  G. Alon, Studies in Jewish History, vol.1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1967, 2 Vols.) 219–253, rejected the rabbinic tradition (Avot Derabbi Natan v. 1 chapter 4, Schechter ed., 22–24; Avot Derabbi Natan v. 2 ch. 6, Schechter ed. 19; Medrash Eicha 1: 31; BT Gittin 56a-b), that Rabbi Yohanan surrendered to Vespasian and received from him personal favors. His opinion was accepted by many researchers. See: Anthony J. Saldorini, “Johanan ben Zakkai’s Escape From Jerusalem: Origin and Development of a Rabbinic Story”, JSJ 6.2 (1975) 189–204; Ben-Zion Rosenfeld, “The Liminal Time from the Destruction of the Second Temple to Yavneh: 70–85/90 CE”, in Peter J. Tomson, Joshua Schwartz (eds.), Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: How to Write Their History (CRINT 14) (Leiden: Brill, 2016) forthcoming (Hereafter: Rosenfeld, “Liminal”). 50   B T Gittin 56a; In principle, the author who was probably not familiar with Hebrew or Aramaic could have seen the story of the actions of Rabbi Zachary in the Talmud Soncino translation published in 1935. However, it would be interesting to know how he found the quote. 51  The position of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai concerning the Great Revolt was unclear. Some researchers said he objected to the revolt from the beginning, and others said he sided with the uprising when it started but then when he saw that it was hopeless he surrendered to the Romans. See Gedalya Alon, “Halihato shel Rabban Yohanan ben Zakai Leyavne”, in idem, Studies in Jewish History I (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad 1967) 219– 253 (Hebrew). 52   The Antagonists, 151–152.

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conduct of the ritual sacrifices and laws of purity.53 This analysis influenced how the author perceived the Pharisee as a rabbi in Masada, in the same way that there were rabbis in Jerusalem during the revolt. The view that Pharisees are peace lovers and are not willing to fight is reflected in the rationale of Zidon the Pharisee when he suggests surrender to Silva: I listened to the Romans and while they spoke I considered my children and your children and how they will be killed if we continue to fight and how they might live if we give ourselves up to Silva.54 This approach was shared by the moderate circles of the mainstream Zionist movement, but rejected by the propagators of the “Masada Myth” as insufficient devotion to the cause, as explained below. 2.2.2 Ezra—The Sadducee55 The positive personal traits Gann attributes to the Sadducee, and his close relationship with Elazar ben Yair, leader of the Sicarii on Masada, seems to be 53  However, Gann probably was not aware of Rabbi Yochanan’s belonging to the Pharisees and opposing the Sadducees. If he would have been aware, perhaps it would have been Zidon the Pharisee mentioning Rabbi Yochanan and not Ezra the Sadducee. Historically speaking, Alon posits that the meeting between Rabbi Yochanan who left the besieged Jerusalem and the Roman General Vespasian is a myth and was constructed only after the success of the Yeshiva in Yavneh. In his opinion Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai started the Yeshiva originally underground when he was exiled to Yavne during the siege. See: Alon (1967) 219–253, and also: idem, The History of the Jews in the Land of Israel in the Period of the Mishnah and Talmud 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1977) 59–60. Clearly, that is not the position of the author of the novel, who compares the meeting of Silva with the Pharisee and Sadducee to that of Vespasian with Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai. 54  The Antagonists, p. 73–74. 55  Indeed, the choice of the name Ezra for the chief Sadducee is intriguing. The Biblical Ezra was chief rabbi of Judaea in the Persian period, who collaborated with Nehemiah, the secular administrator of Judea, a on behalf of the Persian Empire. Ezra preached against intermarriage of Jews and their neighbors and is known to have started the oral law and the concept of rabbinic prohibitions beyond those required by the Torah. Research considers him the “father of oral law” that the Sadducees rejected. However, the Sadducees may have viewed his actions differently as he is a biblical figure and they believed in the written bible. On the teachings of Ezra and Nehemiah: see H. Tadmor, “The Babylonian Exile and Restoration”, in H.H. Ben Sasson (ed.) A History of the Jewish People, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) 174–182. For recent research see also: Ettien Nodet, A search for the Origins of Judaism: From Joshua to the Mishnah, E. Crowly

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in opposition to the descriptions found in Josephus. The Sadducee is portrayed as follows: There was old Ezra, a fierce walnut of a man in spite of his threescore years. He was one of the very last Sadducee survivors, formerly a wealthy importer from Joppa whose defiant independence predated the destruction of his native city by Vespasian.… Elazar had long ago decided he would not trade Ezra for a hundred men. Not only was he wise and learned but a fighter to the very last breath. He often said that he never thought about the future since it would come soon enough. He had fathered eight sons and three daughters all save one killed by the Romans, and yet he kept his balance.56 This image of the Sadducee is very positive. He is presented as a warrior, an honest man, a good friend and a family man, and shown to be a victim of Roman cruelty. Such a depiction is not supported by any of the ancient sources, which describe the Sadducees as an elitist and wealthy group of unpleasant people, who enjoyed powerful positions in society. There is no evidence that there were members of this sect associated with extreme Sicarii, as represented by Elazar, commander of Masada. The author defines Elazar as “one of the very last Sadducee survivors” indicating that he believes that the Sadducees were in effect wiped out by the Romans, which is why they disappeared after the failed revolt. This opinion is disputable since, as a group consisting of wealthier members of society, as ample sources indicate, they were unlikely to have joined the extreme Sicarii who occupied the fortress.57 Regarding the criticism of Zidon the Pharisee as hypocritical, perhaps unsurprisingly, the New Testament seems to criticise the Pharisees and Sadducees equally; it was, after all, the Sadducee High Priest, Caiaphas, who turned Jesus over to the Roman authorities.58 Jesus is quoted saying as follows: (trans.), (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press 1997) 29; Lester Grabbe, Ezra-Nechemiah: Old Testament Readings (London: Routledge, 1998) 11–68; Paula McNutt, Reconstructing of Society of Ancient Israel, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999) 183; Paolo Sacchi, The History of the Second Temple Period, (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2004), 131. 56   The Antagonists, 69. 57  On the connection between the rich and collaboration with Rome see Louis Finkelman, The Pharisees: The Sociological Background of their Faith (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1966, 2 Vols.), I, 1–6; Silberman (2002) 249–250. 58  Matthew 26: 57 names the high Priest. Mark 14: 53–63; Luke 22: 66–71 merely states that the High Priest and Sanhedrin find Jesus guilty and send him to Pilate the governor. In all

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“Be careful”, Jesus said to them. “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”59 Then they understood that he was not telling them to guard against the yeast used in bread, but against the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.60 Thus, according to the New Testament, the image of the Sadducee on Masada should be as negative as that of the Pharisee. Nevertheless, analyses of scholarship on the subject matter during the period in which the work was written, and prior to that, show that the emphasis of Christian criticism was pointed at this stage toward the Pharisees, who were considered by the New Testament as “hypocritical”.61 Firstly, there are very few works devoted to the Sadducees, while there are quite a few that describe the Pharisees and explain their doctrine. Neusner and Chilton, who wrote extensively on Judeo-Christian issues, devote an entire volume, entitled In Quest of the Historical Pharisees, to this group, devoting little space to the Sadducees.62 When discussing research of the Pharisees until 1970, Jacob Neusner writes: sources subsequently the high priest demands Jesus’s execution. It is stated in Acts 4: 1 and 5: 17, that the head priest and temple sect were Sadducees. 59  Matthew 16: 6. 60  Matthew 16: 11–12. 61  For a summary and analyses of Christian criticism and Jewish response concerning the Pharisees in the time before writing “The Antagonists” see Jacob Neusner, “The Anglo American Theological Tradition to 1970”, in Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton (eds.), In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Waco: Baylor University Press 2007) 375–395. Some of the works on the Pharisees prior to 1970 cited by Neusner are: Louis Finkelstein, The Pharisees: The Sociological Background of their Faith (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1938); Leo Baeck, “The Pharisees and the Gospels”, in Israel Davidson (ed.), Leo Baeck: The Pharisees and other Essays (New York: Shocken, 1947); Jacob Z. Lauterbach, “The Sadducees and Pharisees”, in Idem, Rabbinic Essays (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1951), 23–50; Idem, “A Significant Controversy”, in Ibid., 51–86; Idem, “The Pharisees and their Teachings”, in ibid., 87–162; Ralph Marcus, “The Pharisees in Light of Modern Scholarship”, JR 32 (1952) 153–164; George F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954) (3 Vols.), R. TraversHerford, The Pharisees (Boston: Beacon, 1962); Idem, The Rise and Fall of the Judean State: A Political, Social and Religious History of the Second Commonwealth (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962, 1967) (2 Vols.). 62  Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton (eds.), In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Waco: Baylor University Press 2007). The entire book is devoted to careful analyses of the material concerning the Pharisees in each of the Christian gospels, and the writings of Josephus.

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The historians are further to be blamed for allowing the theologians to set the issue: Where the Pharisees really hypocrites? What shall we say in response to the Christian theological criticism of the Pharisees? … Since the Christian theologians set the agenda, the Jewish ones can hardly be condemned for responding to it especially since contemporary antiSemitism was both expressed and aided by the Christian scholarly assessment of Pharisaism.63 The reason for this could be that contemporary Jews saw themselves as the descendants of the Pharisees, and the Christians therefore related primarily to the material found in the New Testamentconcerning that sect. Jewish scholars tried to refute the claim in Christian sources that the Pharisees were stringent in theory but hypocritical in practice. One of their central arguments was that the Christian scholars were not fluent with rabbinic literature. The Sadducees, on the other hand, as an extinct sect, were not even discussed. It is possible, therefore, that Gann was not aware of the criticism the New Testament expresses for the Sadducees as well as for the Pharisees. However, the extremely positive description of the Sadducee, presenting him as a freedom fighter while the Pharisee is a cunning person avoiding direct conflict seems to be a result of Gann’s wish to depict the Zionist Jew’s spiritual leadership, and to express his admiration of Yadin himself, a figure who specialized in bible but had no interest in rabbinic Judaism. In light of this portrayal, I would suggest that the image of Ezra is meant to represent the spiritual leader of the Zionist movement during the time that Gann wrote The Antagonists, more than it was intended to reflect the image of the authentic Sadducee from the time of the events on Masada. Indeed, the ideological stances of the Sadducee were compatible with this type of spiritual leader: rejection of rabbinic Pharisee interpretation of Judaism, rejection of life after death and the need to live well in this world, belief in the social values of the prophets and simple understanding of the Torah. Moreover, the aspects of freedom fighting, integrity and popularity, were characteristic of modern Israelis not the ancient Sadducees. Furthermore, there is a striking resemblance between the image of Ezra and that of Yigael Yadin. Ezra is the Sadducee who was both a former fighter and current spiritual leader and negotiator with the Romans. Yadin, excavator of

63  Neusner (2007) 379. This he writes of the European Jewish scholars. However, as he shows later (380–394) this description is true for later Anglo scholars as well.

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the site of Masada, had been Chief of staff of the Israeli Army, and, after his resignation from this post at the age of thirty five, wrote a doctoral thesis on the Dead Sea scrolls. Thereafter, he continued to be involved in the civilian side Israel’s security, while at the same time publishing extensively on cultural, ideological and historical issues.64 3

The Pharisee and Sadducee as Representing Opposing Ideologies in the Labor Party Zionistic Movement

The above dichotomy as to whether to advocate Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai’s pragmatic approach to independence or the radical views of Elazar ben Yair is in the core root of the labor party that was the core root of the Zionist movement. Within the movement there were those who believed in use of force in order to achieve the goals of Zionism and those who opposed sacrifice of life for that purpose. On this issue Anita Shapira states: The revolt of the Zealots and Yavne, that were opposite extremes in Jewish history, were the topic of an intense debate over national symbols and their meaning between Achad Haam65 and Berdishevsky,66 who wished to be released from the value system that crystalized in exile, and to release the vibrant, heroic foundations within the Jewish people that were placed in the binds of the Pharisee worldview and were buried under the piles of Talmudic discourse … For the first time in Jewish historiography the colossal failures of Jewish history in the second temple period were placed on a pedestal and presented as a lively positive phenomenon, a source for national pride and educational ethos. When Max Nordau67 praises the Bil”u movement, he states that they were: “stronger 64  See: Neil A. Silberman, A Prophet From Amongst You: The Life Of Yigael Yadin: Soldier, Scholar, and Mythmaker Of Modern Israel, (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993). On Yadin’s military career see Yoram Peri, Between Battles and Ballots: Israeli Military in Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 190–193; On disagreement with PM Ben Gurion, ibid., 55. 65  The pen name of Asher Zvi Ginsberg (1856-`1927), founder of the stream of “Spiritual Zionism” and one of the great visionaries of the Zionist movement. 66  Micha Yoseph Berdichevsky (1865–1921), was one of the leaders of the Zionist movement who stated that the Jewish weakness was the reason for the long exile. 67  Max Nordau (1949–1923), was Hertzl’s right hand man in the leadership of the zionist movement who pushed for “Practical Zionism” in contrast to Ahad Haam’sk “Spiritual Zionism”. He called for the development of “Jews with Muscles”.

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than the disciples of Rabbi Yochanan son of Zakai, great like the warriors of Bar Cochba, the man who fought not for Jewish culture … rather … for Jewish national existence on the soil of the fathers.68 This was the perception the Zionist movement had of the leaders of the Pharisees during the revolt and afterwards. Only many years later did historians prove that another Pharisee of the time, Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, participated in the revolt and stayed until the end, and that Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai himself supported the revolt at first, and only when he saw it was hopeless he chose to leave the besieged Jerusalem and surrender.69 Indeed, there is no indication in the sources that the Sadducees were warriors more than the Pharisees, but the mere fact that their leader did not surrender to Vespasian, and that they disappear as a sect after the revolt would be a basis for Gann’s portrait of Ezra as a “warrior”, and a valiant honest person who could be relied upon.70 This approach to Zionism was indeed controversial within the mainstream Zionist movement. Anita Shapira presents the conflict between the two approaches in the Zionist movement as a debate as to whether to base the new Jewish state on inspiration from second temple freedom fighters, or on comparison to the first temple Kingdom and the demand for social justice.71 However, she makes it clear that both approaches remained part of the Zionist movement and operated side by side.72

68  Anita Shapira, Visions in Conflict (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1989) 27–28 (Hebrew). The quote from Max Nordau is taken from his book: Max Nordau, To His Nation: National Essays, (Tel Aviv: Mitzpa, 1937, 6 vols.Hebrew) 2:7. 69  On the positions of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel concerning the revolt see S. Safrai, “The Jews in the Land of Israel (70–335)”, in H.H. Sasson (ed.), A History of the Jewish People, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) 319. Compare his opinion to that of G. Alon, A History of the Jews in the Period of the Mishna and Talmud (Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1977, 2 vols.) 1: 53–70. 70  Israel Ben Shalom, The School of Shammai and the Zealots’ Struggle Against Rome, Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1993), 231–252 argued that the Pharisee house of Shammai supported the revolt and therefore disappeared after the destruction, in contrast to the house of Hillel that was more moderate. The Sadducees were closer to Beit Shamai than to Beit Hillel and that may be a reason to assume that their disappearance can also be attributed to fighting the Romans without compromise. 71  Shapira (1989) 29–30. This was the opinion of Asher Z. Ginzburg (Achad Ha’am), “The First Zionist Congress”, in Idem, At the Crossroads, (Berlin:Yudishe Perlog, 1930) (Hebrew) (44 Vols.) 3: 52–54. 72  Ibid., 30. c.

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The message that war and self-sacrifice were necessary components of Zionism was reiterated during the establishments of the “Hebrew Brigades” in the British army during World War I. At the time Shmuel Yavneeli stated: All our days we mused: “When will this Mitzva (=positive deed) come to our hands and we will fulfill it, when will the day of trial come and we will give our lives for the country”.73 This approach was further enhanced in the wake of the Arab attacks on the Jewish settlements in 1920–1921, and primarily that of Tel Hai, in which eight Jewish people died, among them Josef Trumpeldor. Yoseph Haim Brenner wrote: When the difficult trial will come, will each and every one of us stand— with the name of Trumpeldor and his friends on his lips—in the place where his destination is? … praised is he who dies with this in his mind— and Tel Hai under his head.74 The above shows that the approach of these thinkers was that it is important to fight and die for the country even if death is futile. This was later the approach of “Offensive Zionism” to the issue of a Jewish minority in Palestine fighting the Arab majority.75 One of the spokesmen of this approach was David Ben

73  Shmuel Yavne’eli, “The Obligatory Words”, in Al Hasaf: A Compilation of Literary and Practical Issues, Jerusalem 1914. There were those who objected to volunteering to the British army or any form of military for Jews, but they were a minority in the Zionist movement. See Shapira (1989) 41. 74  Yoseph Haim Brenner, “Haadama”, Yalkut Achdut Haavoda 1 (1922) 212–213. See also idem “From Here and There” (1911), reprinted in Yoseph Haim Brenner Collected Writings, (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1978–1985, 4 Vols.), 1440. 75  This term was coined by Anita Shapira (1989) 60, in reference to the approach of the Palma”ch and Chi”sh that were divisions of the Haganah and labor party that believed that an independent Jewish state will be possible only if the Zionist movement takes the offensive against the Arab objection. She also calls it the “Ethos of the Warrior”. This approach to Zionism conflicted with “Evolutionary Zionism” that thought that by immigration and settlement a Jewish majority will be created and a Jewish state will be established without war or bloodshed. The Palmach adopted the Masada site for rituals and delivering their ideological message. See Silberman (2002), 245.

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Gurion, who at the time was the head of the Jewish Agency, which was at the time the official Jewish leadership and run by the Labour party.76 Such a philosophy is also depicted by the words of Shmaria Guttman, one of the founding fathers of the Masada myth, when faced with the advance of the German army in North Africa toward Palestine during World War II: The question is: is fight needed? Is it worth it? Why is fight necessary? Maybe it is better to surrender? Why did the Jews have to fight the Nazis? Did they have to go to the death camps the gas, and maybe a few could have been saved. I did not accept this way. And I understand the people on Masada that hoped and fought.77 The mainstream orthodox movement, on the other hand, was considered pacifistic and removed from the courage and daring necessary for the Zionist movement. Nachman Ben Yehudah explains: It is Shmaria’s interpretation that Jewish orthodoxy in the Diaspora has thrived on the longings for the holy land and has thereby justified the continued exile of the Jewish people.78 The activists of the Zionistic movement were interested in using the Masada myth to convince the Jewish people to fight for the land. However, Elazar the warrior would be a suitable leader only for the secular public.79 For those who needed religious ideology in order to justify their behavior, it was advantageous to find a religious leader who was also a “fighter”, as well as a visionary who found his inspiration in the Bible. This is the image of Ezra the Sadducee, who, like some of the Zionist leaders of the time (the prime example being David ben Gurion who was Prime Minister during the excavations of Yadin at

76  Shapira (1989) 58–65. Ben- Gurion, as he testifies, was influenced by the militant writings of Berdichevsky. See Avner Holtzman, “Between Micha Yoseph Bersichevsky and David Ben-Gurion”, Iyunim Bitkumat Israel 3 (1993) 191–204. 77  See Guttman (1986) 11. 78  Ben Yehuda (1995) 75. 79  On Elazar’s secular image, see Maurice (2016) 317–318, who points out that throughout the narrative Elazar does not practice anything Jewish. He is distinctly Jewish only when speaking to the people.

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Masada) respects the Bible, even if he did not necessarily adhere to rabbinical orthodoxy.80 3.1 Pharisees and a Sadducee in the Eyes of the Romans As mentioned previously, over the course of the siege, Zidon initiates a move to surrender to the Romans.81 Most of the Pharisees join him, as does Ezra the Sadducee.82 The defection of Ezra and Zidon the Pharisee is compatible with the way Josephus presented the philosophies of the four sects of Judaism, namely the Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and Zealots. Of these groups, only the Zealots would support fighting at Masada until the end, at which point they commit suicide rather than fall into enemy hands.83 In Gann’s view, the authentic freedom fighters were the zealots and they were the main opponents of Rome.

80  On Ben Gurion and the Tanach see Abraham Avi Hai, Ben Gurion, State Builder: Principles and Pragmatism, 1948–1963 (New York and Toronto: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), 42–45; D. Ben Gurion, “The Tanach and the Jewish People”, in idem, Iyunim Batanach (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1976) 221–222 (Hebrew); Idem, “The Bible Lights up Itself: A Letter to Isaac Demiel Shweiger September 1953”, in ibid., 47–49; Moshe Perlman, David Ben Gurion (Tel Aviv: Zemorah Bitan, 1987) 248–249 (Hebrew); Haim Gevaryahu, “Memories from the Tanach Class in the house of Ben Gurion”, in M. Kogan (ed.), Ben Gurion and the Bible: A Nation and It’s Land, (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 1989) 72 (Hebrew); Anita Shapira, “Ben‐Gurion and the Bible: the forging of an historical narrative”, Middle Eastern Studies674–645 )1997( 33 ; On the Zionist movement and the bible, see Idem, “The Bible and Israeli Identity”, AJS Review 28 (2004) 11–41. 81  However, in his BBC television series (1973) Gann leaves Ezra as Elazar’s right hand man up until the end, and Zidon does not defect either. 82  a somewhat surprising move, since Ezra was depicted as a fierce warrior whose entire family participated in fighting the Romans before being slaughtered in Jerusalem (as related in p. 69). The author finds a way to justify the surrender without making Ezra into a coward or a peace-monger, by giving a twofold rationale for his surrender, namely that he is too old to be an affective warrior and therefore will be no use to Elazar, and that he is able to frighten the Romans, by prophesying terrible things that will happen to the Roman army, and in this way try to instigate a mutiny which indeed happens (p. 77–78). Ezra and Zidon are then charged by Silva for instigating a rebellion. 83  On the origins of the ideology justifying suicide rather than surrender, see David J. Ladouceur, “Masada: A consideration of literary evidence”, Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies, 21.3 (1980) 245–260”; Menachem Stern, “The Suicide of Elazaar ben Yair and his Men at Masada and the Fourth Philosophy”, Zion 47.4 (1982) 367–398 (Hebrew); Menachem Luz, “Elazar’s Second Speech on Masada and its Literary Precedents”, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 126 (1983) 25–43.

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The surrender of the Pharisee and Sadducee enables a dialogue to take place between the Roman Governor, Flavius Silva, and representatives of the Jewish religious sects. This meeting occurs after the party deserting Masada surrenders to the Romans, and Ezra spreads a prophecy amongst the Roman guards that the Roman army is going to die from the overwhelming heat of the Dead Sea area.84 This is how the author describes Silva’s impression of the two Jewish leaders: Silva had already decided that Zidon was a born conniver. Look at him now, he thought, see how his eyes are alert to your every movement and expression—terror draining the very blood from his face. In contrast observe the other Jew, the one called Ezra. He stands there as if he owned the very earth beneath his feet which of course in a sense he does, but he is still standing in my tent. Watch him. There is a worthy man, and a wise one and a brave one.85 Silva’s feelings about the two Jews are identical to those of Elazar, which provides a point of connection between Elazar, the proud Jew, and Silva, the noble Roman. Both appreciate the same qualities in men: bravery, honesty, and wisdom. This shows that, in Gann’s world, gentiles and Jews can share admiration for opposing freedom fighters and both share values, despising cowards and hypocrites. Gann, however, does not leave Ezra alive, instead having him get killed by a stone that falls down the mountain while he is working for the Romans. Only the two antagonists, Elazar and Silva, remain for the final showdown, while Zidon the Pharisee is subjected to forced labor against his brethren. This twist in the plot complies with the message that the author internalized from his contacts with the Zionist movement: the religious segment of the population, and in particular its leadership, are too pacifistic and incapable of conducting a fight for the freedom of the Jewish people. The establishment of a Jewish

84  There are sources that the zealots had a lot of people that were predicting apocalyptic events such as the one Ezra is telling the Romans. See Eyal Regev, “Flourishing before the Crisis: Mapping Judean Society in the First Century C.E.”, in P.J. Tomson and Joshua Schwartz (eds.), Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: How to Write their Story (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2014) 52–69. In this case the rational Ezra is trying to mislead the Romans in order to stir rebellion amongst the soldiers. 85   The Antagonists, p. 151. The self-confidence of Ezra and lack of fear is repeated in the next pages of the encounter between the Jewish leaders and Silva a number of times.

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independent state can be carried out only by the secular Jews who are committed only to that cause.86 4

Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and Jewish Diversity—the Downfall of the Jews

Silva discovers that Ezra is a Sadducee and Zidon a Pharisee and presents them with the identical question of whether they believe in immortality. Naturally Ezra replies negatively, in accordance with the beliefs of his sect, while Zidon replies in the affirmative,87 to which Silva replies, “There you are! Even on the most basic matters you Jews cannot agree. How can you deny your people need our guidance?”. Hence, the claim is made that since the Jews are divided amongst themselves, particularly on issues of faith, they are in need of foreign powers to guide them. This is in contrast to the Jewish position that ideological disagreement is legitimate as long as it is respectful and idealistic.88 It is possible that this is the reason that Gann wished to have the Sadducee and Pharisee confront the general, Silva, for it brings out the statement of Silva that the ideological differences within Judaism were its downfall, something that Elazar would probably agree with as well. Indeed, in the script Gann wrote later for the movie based on the novel, it is Elazar who shares this insight with Silva.89 Historical facts underlie this claim of disunity, for, when the Romans first conquered Judaea there were two contenders to the Judean crown: Hyrcanus the second and his brother Aristobulus the second, the two sons

86  On the attitude of the Zionist leadership to the religious Zionists see Zvi Zameret, “Ben Gurion, the “Shulkhan Aruch” and the “New Codex”: Roots of the Tension between Ben Gurion and Religious Jewry”, in Avi Sagi and Dov Schwartz (eds.) A Hundred Years of Religious Zionism Vol. 3: Philosophical Aspects (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2003) 401–420 (Hebrew). 87  On the controversy between Sadducees and Pharisees regarding resurrection of the dead, see Jonathan Klawans, “Afterlives and Noble Deaths”, in idem, Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) 92–111. Interestingly, the Roman author Tacitus (Histories 5.5.3.) wrote that all Jews believed in an afterlife. It seems he was not aware of the Sadducee position. 88  See: M. Avot 5: 17. 89  In the playwright Silva takes Elazar captive, negotiates a truce with him and then releases him. The truce is then regected by Vespasian. When negotiating with Flavius Silva Elazar states: “leave the Jews alone and they will kill each other. When we have an enemy we are united”.

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of Queen Shlomzion (Alexandra).90 Ironically, it seems from the sources that Aristobulus, like his father Alexaner Janeus, was a Sadducee, while his brother was close to the Pharisees.91 The description of the disagreement between the Sadducees and Pharisees over the issue of immortality is, however, a superficial description of the argument. It reflects primarily the view of the sects perpetrated by the New Testament. The debate in the novel does not contain the primary differences between the sects described in rabbinical sources, which concerned the form of worship in the temple, and which were even more disabling to Judaism than the theological disagreements. Furthermore, it does not contain Josephus’ description of the disagreement between the two sects concerning the attitude to the oral tradition, a dispute that is a far more fundamental difference, in that it has a profound effect on religious Jewish daily life. All this adds to the argument that the author’s purpose of placing a Sadducee and Pharisee on Masada along with the Zealots was not in order to be authentic in portraying the Jewish faith at that period, but rather to convey modern ideas concerning the struggle and survival of the Jewish state in his times. Ideological uniformity was a central issue for the state of Israel in its early years when it was led by the Labour party, and this idea emerges from the way Silva justifies Roman dominance over the Jews in their lack of theological uniformity.92 5

The Absence of the Essenes

Another indication that the author was influence by the spirit of the times and not interested in portraying the sects as they were is that one sect is omitted from this novel. Josephus described the sect of the Essenes extensively,93 and it is clear that from a religious point of view they are at least as interesting as the Sadducees and Pharisees, if not more so. Archaeological finds at Masada, some known when the novel was written, point to Essene presence on the mountain 90   B J I:122. 91  Hyrcanos was the High Priest during the reign of his mother Alexandra who gave all religious authority to the Pharisees. On the other hand Aristobolus is reported to be close to the priests and heads of the army. The assumption in research is that many of the priests were Sadducee. 92  On the question what was the central division between the second-temple sects see ibid., 212–214. 93   B J II 165–168.

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during the revolt, and a number of scrolls that are attributed to this sect were found at the site. Despite this, Silva mentions them only casually (153) as “having a different opinion entirely”.94 Conclusions Ernest Gann has introduced various kinds of Jews into his story of Masada according to his own interpretations and contemporary ideas, making this a fascinating opportunity to have a glimpse into how such ideas influence the reception of ancient events and texts. As shown above, his main motive to describing the Sadducee and Pharisee was not authenticity but rather compliance with the “Masada Myth” in which he believed, and promotion of the culture of the branch of the Zionist movement that propagated the myth— the activist side of the Labour party movement. Therefore, when describing the sects he utilized only limited parts of the existing literature accessible to him through the New Testament and translations of the Talmud, presenting a very partial and stereotypical view of the members of the sects. Although seemingly unaware of the debate as to whether the Sadducees were really freedom fighters or were collaborators with Rome, his narrative, nevertheless, is instructive in raising the questions of what it was like to be an individual Pharisee or Sadducee. What would it be like to meet them? What relationship did they have with the zealots? These questions have seldom been addressed in literature and it is therefore fascinating that this work depicts some glimpse of the nature of a Jewish society which included these ideologies and sects. It also promotes a philosophical opinion that Jewish diversity, even on religious, theoretical and philosophical issues, has been a major deterrent of Jewish success in history, idealising the zealots who were unbothered by all these philosophic issues, and were dealing with the mere existence and freedom of the people. During the first years of the state of Israel, the struggle for the survival of the state was indeed an overriding factor that blurred many of the inner 94  This issue was remedied in the televised version also written by Gann, where the Essenes join the rebels on Masada after the Romans confiscate their village and give it to veterans that are being released from the legion after many years of service. At that time the Essenes were of interest to the public because much academic work was being conducted on their scriptures and they were seen as an inspiration for Jesus’s criticism of the rabbis. On the relationship between Jesus and the Essenes and the impact of scroll research on modern public opinion, see Hartmut Stegeman, On the Essenes, Qumran, John the Baptist and Jesus, (Leiden: Brill, 1998), esp. 12–30 and 228–256.

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differences between Israelis of different ideologies and a different vision of what the internal policy of a Jewish state should be. Only when the danger of destruction is removed is it possible to have the luxury of disagreement concerning ritual issues.95 Bibliography Alon, Gedalia, “Halihato shel Rabban Yohanan ben Zakai Leyavne”, in: idem, Studies in Jewish History I (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad 1967) 219–253 (Hebrew). Alon, Gedalia, The History of the Jews in the Land of Israel in the Period of the Mishnah and Talmud (2 Vols., Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1977) 59–60. Avi-Haim, Avraham, Ben Gurion, State Builder: Principles and Pragmatism, 1948–1963 (New York and Toronto: John Wiley and Sons, 1974). Baeck, Leo, “The Pharisees and the Gospels”, in Israel Davidson (ed.), Leo Baeck: The Pharisees and other Essays (New York: Shocken, 1947). Baumgarten, Albert: The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 1997). Ben Gurion, David, “The Tanach and the Jewish People”, in: idem, Iyunim Batanach (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1976) 221–222 (Hebrew). Ben Gurion, David, “The Bible Lights up Itself: A Letter to Isaac Demiel Schweiger September 1953”, in idem, Iyunim Batanach (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1976) 47–49 (Hebrew). Ben-Shalom, Israel, The School of Shammai and the Zealots’ Struggle Against Rome (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1993). Ben-Yehudah, Nachman, The Masada Myth (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1995 (Hebrew). Bowker, John W., Jesus and the Pharisees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). Braslowski, Yosef, When Masada Fell (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1941). Braslowski, Yosef, Masada (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1944) (Hebrew). Brenner, Yosef H., “Haadama” 6, Yalkut Achdut Haavoda 1 (1922) 212–213. Brenner, Yosef H., “From Here and There”, in idem, Collected Writings (Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hameuchad 1978–1985) (4 Vols, Hebrew) 1440.

95  The theory that Jewish sectarianism was a luxury that was afforded during the period of Jewish independence under the Hasmonean Kings was suggested by Albert Baumgarten in his work, The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 1997) esp. 160–240.

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Brighton, Mark A., The Sicarii in Josephus’s Judean War: rhetorical analysis and historical observations (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literatre, 2009) 107–131. Brown, Raymond E., An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Yale University Press, 1997). Campell, Duncan B. “Capturing a desert fortress: Flavius Silva and the siege of Masada”, Ancient Warfare 4. 2 (2010) 28–35. Carson, Donald, Moo, Douglas J. and Leon Moris, An Introduction to the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992) 19–61. Chilton, Bruce, “Paul and the Pharisees”, in Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton, In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Wako: Baylor University Press, 2007) 149–175. Cohen, Shaye J.D., “Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus”, JJS 33 (1982) 385–405. Cotton, Hanna M., “The date of the fall of Masada: the evidence of the Masada papyri”, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 78 (1989) 157–162. Droge, Arthur J. and James D. Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992). Geoff, Eley, “What are the Contexts for German Anti-Semitism: Some Thoughts on the Origins of Nazism”, in: J. Frankel (ed.), The Fate of the European Jews 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 100–133. Feldman, Louis H., “Masada: A Critique of Recent Scholarship”, in Jacob Neusner (ed.), Christianity, Judaism, and Other Greco-Roman Cults, Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty (Leiden: Brill 1975). Feldman, Louis H., Josephus and Modern Scholarship 1937–1980 (Berlin: de Gruyter 1984). Finkelstein, Luis, The Pharisees: The Sociological Background of their Faith (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1938). Gevaryahu, Haim, “Memories from the Tanach Class in the house of Ben Gurion”, in M. Kogan (ed.), Ben Gurion and the Bible: A Nation and Its Land (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 1989) 72–80, (Hebrew). Ginsberg, Asher Z., “The First Jewish Congress”, in idem, At the Crossroads, (Berlin: Yudishe Perlog, 1930) (Hebrew) (4 Vols.) 3: 52 ff. Grabbe, Lester, Ezra-Nechemiah: Old Testament Readings (London: Routledge, 1998). Guttman, Shmarya, “Historical Survey”, in Pinchas Hillman, Avraham Magen, Masada as an Educational Value: The Transcription of a Day of Deliberations on the Topic Dated October 31 1985 (Efal: Yad Tabenkin United Kibbutz Movement Press, 1986) 11–15. Haaland, Gunnar, “What Difference Does Philosophy Make? The Three Schools as a Rhetorical Device in Josephus”, in Zuleika Rodgers (ed.), Making History: Josephus and the Historical Method (Leiden: Brill, 2007) 262–288.

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Hakola, Reimo and Adele Reinhartz, “John’s Pharisees”, in Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton, In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Wako: Baylor University Press, 2007) 131–149. Hengel, Martin, The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I until 70 AD (Tamp: T&T Clark Ltd, 1989). Herford, Robert T., The Pharisees (Boston: Beacon, 1962). Herford, Robert T., The Rise and Fall of the Judean State: A Political, Social and Religious History of the Second Commonwealth (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962, 1967) (2 Vols.). Holtzman, Avner, “Between Micha Yoseph Bersichevsky and David Ben-Gurion”, Iyunim Bitkumat Israel 3 (1993) 191–204 (Hebrew). Horsley, Robert A., “The Sicarii: Ancient Jewish Terrorists”, Journal of Religion 59.4 (1979) 435–458. Jackson, K.P., “Revolutionaries in the First Century”, in John F. Hall and John W. Welch (eds.), Masada and the World of the New Testament (ProvoUtah: BYU, 1997) 130–142. Jenson, Gary F., The Path of the Devil: Early Modern Witch Hunts (New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006) 156. Jastrow, Marcus, A Dictionary of the Targumim, The Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (London: W. C. Luzak and Co. and New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903) 1092. Klauzner, Joseph, “Masada and its Heroes”, Lanoar 62, Tel Aviv: Omanut, 3 (1933) (Hebrew). Klawans, Jonathan, Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012) 144–210. Lamdan, Yitzchak, Masada (Tel Aviv: Heidim, 1927). Ladouceur, David J., “Josephus and Masada”, in Louis H. Feldman and Gōhei Hata (eds.), Josephus, Judaism and Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 1987) 95–114. Lauterbach, Jacob Z., “The Sadducees and Pharisees”, in idem, Rabbinic Essays, (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1951) 23–50. Levine, Jill, “Luke’s Pharisees”, in Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton (eds.), In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Wako: Baylor University Press, 2007) 113–131. Levine, Jill, “A Significant Controversy”, in Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton (eds.), In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Wako: Baylor University Press, 2007) 51–86. Luz, Menachem, “Elazar’s Second Speech on Masada and its Literary Precedents”, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 126 (1983) 25–43. Maccoby, Hyam, Jesus the Pharisee (Norwich UK: SCM Press, 2003). Marcus, Ralph, “The Pharisees in Light of Modern Scholarship”, JR 32 (1952) 153–164. Mason, Steven, Josephus and the Pharisees (Leiden: Brill, 2001).

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Mason, Steven, “Essenes and Lurking Spartans in Josephus’s Judean War: From Story to History”, in Zuleika Rodgers (ed.), Making History: Josephus and the Historical Method (Leiden: Brill, 2007) 219–261. Maurice, Lisa, “Jews and Judaism in Rome”, in Monica Cyrino, Rome, Season Two: Trial and Triumph (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) 88–104. Maurice, Lisa, “Swords, Sandals and Prayer Shawls: Depicting Jews and Romans on the Silver Screen”, in David Schaps, Daniela Dueck and Uri Yiftach (eds.), When the First Western Empire Met the Near East, Graeca Tergestina, Storia e Civiltà (Edizioni: Università di Trieste, 2016) 310–321. McgNutt, Paula, Reconstructing of Society of Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999). Moore, George F., Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954) (3 Vols.). Neriah, Moshe Z., “Hitabdutam shel Anshei Metzada Bahalakha”, in: idem, Tznif Melucha (Kfar Haroeh: Khai Ro’I, 1992) 196–198. Neusner, Jacob, “The Anglo American Theological Tradition to 1970”, in Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton (eds.), In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007). Neusner, Jacob and Bruce D. Chilton (eds.), In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007). Nodet, Ettien, A search for the Origins of Judaism: From Joshua to the Mishnah (trans. E. Crowly) (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press 1997). Nordau, Max, To His Nation: National Essays (Tel Aviv: Mitzpa, 1937, 6 vols, Hebrew). Peri, Yoram, Between Battles and Ballots: Israeli Military in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Perlman, Moshe, David Ben Gurion (Tel Aviv: Zemorah Bitan, 1987) (Hebrew). Pickup, Martin, “Matthew’s and Mark’s Pharisees”, in Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton (eds.), In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Wako: Baylor University Press, 2007) 67–113. Rappaport, Uriel, “Josephus’ personality and the credibility of his narrative”, in Zuleika Rodgers, Making History: Josephus and Historical Method (Leiden: Brill, 2006) 68–81. Rappaport, Uriel, “Who Were the Sicarii?”, in Mladen Popović (ed.), The Jewish Revolt Against Rome: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011) 323–343. Regev, Eyal, “Flourishing before the Crisis: Mapping Judean Society in the First Century C.E.”, in P.J. Tomson and Joshua Schwartz (eds.), Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: How to Write their Story (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2014) 52–69.

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Roth, Jonathan P., “The Length of the Siege of Masada”, Scripta Classica Israelica 14 (1995) 87–109. Sacchi, Paolo, The History of the Second Temple Period (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2004). Safrai, Samuel, “The Jews in the Land of Israel (70–335)”, in H.H. Sasson (ed.), A History of the Jewish People, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) 319. Saldarini, Anthony J., Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society: A Sociological Approach (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). Schwartz, Barry, Yael Zerubavel and Bernice M. Barnett, “The Recovery Of Masada: A Study in Collective Memory”, The Sociological Quarterly 27.2 (1986) 147–164. Shapira, Anita, Visions in Conflict (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1989) (Hebrew). Shapira, Anita, “Ben‐Gurion and the Bible: the forging of an historical narrative”, Middle Eastern Studies 33 (1997) 645–674. Shapira, Anita, “The Bible and Israeli Identity”, AJS Review 28 (2004) 11–41. Shashar, Menachem, “Shmarya Guttman: The Creator of Massada Myth and the Exposer of Gamla in the Golan and Susia on the Book Bamidbar”, Eretz 1 (1987) 24 (Hebrew). Silverman, Neil, A Prophet From Amongst You: The Life Of Yigael Yadin: Soldier, Scholar, and Mythmaker Of Modern Israel (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1993). Smallwood, Mary, “Introduction”, in Gerald A. Williamson (trans.) The Jewish War by Josephus Flavius (New York: Dorset Press, 1981) 8–19. Smith, Morton, “Sicarii, Zealots and Sicarii: Their Origins and Relation”, The Harvard Theological Review 64. 1 (1971) 1–19, reprinted in Shaye J. D. Cohen (ed.), Studies in the Cult of Yahawe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1995) 211–226. Stegeman, Hartmut, On the Essenes, Qumran, John the Baptist and Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Stern, Menachem, “The Suicide of Elazaar ben Yair and his Men at Masada and the Fourth Philosophy”, Zion 47.4 (1982) 367–398 (Hebrew). Tadmor, Haim, “The Babylonian Exile and Restoration”, in H.H. Ben Sasson (ed.), A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) 174–182. Tomson, Peter J., “Jesus and his Judaism”, in Markus Bockmuehl (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 30–35. Van Hetten, Jan W., “Martyrion and Martyrdom: Some Remarks about Noble Death in Josephus”, in F. Siegert and J. Kalms (eds.), Internationales Josephus—Kolloquium Brüssel 1998 (Münster: Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum, 1999) 124–141. Yadin, Yigael, Masada (London and New York: Random House, 1966). Yadin, Yigael, “Masada and the Zealots’ Last Stand”, in J.F. Hall and J.W. Welch (eds.), Masada and the World of the New Testament (Provo Utah: BYU Press, 1997) 18–22.

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Yavne’eli, Shmuel, “The Obligatory Words”, in Al Hasaf: A Compilation of Literary and Practical Issues (Jerusalem 1914) (Hebrew). Zameret, Zvi, “Ben Gurion, the “Shulkhan Aruch” and the “New Codex”: Roots of the Tension between Ben Gurion and Religious Jewry”, in Avi Sagi and Dov Schwartz (eds.), A Hundred Years of Religious Zionism Vol. 3: Philosophical Aspects (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2003) 401–420 (Hebrew). Zerubavel, Yael, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

CHAPTER 11

Emotion and Reception of the Ancient World in Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) Emily Chow-Kambitsch How important are considerations for the role of emotions in the reconstruction of antiquity in historical fiction and its popular cultural impact? In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, fictional representations of Imperial Rome in conflict with emergent Christianity channeled American anxieties about the country’s fate as it struggled to maintain moral equilibrium amidst the opportunities and dangers of modernity. This chapter explores dynamics of emotion in the text of Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), and in American readers’ responses to the novel in the immediate decades following its publication. Emotions constitute an important aspect of the novel’s history in the United States, where extraordinary numbers of surviving responses from original readers testify that Ben-Hur changed the lives of those who read it.1 Ben-Hur created a cultural sensation—a mass consumption of a historical narrative that captured nineteenth-century American cultural anxieties concerning simultaneous self-identification with Roman Imperial decadence and Christian moral determination and asceticism.2 This ‘Ben-Hur phenomenon’ manifested itself to a large extent through readers’ active and sustained engagement with the text. Letters from readers to Lew Wallace testify to collective 1  I would like to thank the following archives for allowing me physical access to materials documenting audience responses to the novel: the Marian Morrison Local History Collection, Crawfordsville District Public Library; the Indiana Historical Society; and the Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington. Special thanks go out to the Lilly Library for awarding me an Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship to support my visit to the Wallace archives there. 2  Thus termed in Margaret Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America (Malden: WileyBlackwell, 2009) 133–46. Jon Solomon, Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and (eds.) Barbara Ryan and Milette Shamir, Bigger Than Ben-Hur: The Book, Its Adaptations, and Their Audiences (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016) have recently demonstrated the considerable value the wealth of evidence associated with the ‘Ben-Hur phenomenon’ or ‘Ben-Hur tradition’ stands to serve in various fields, including American literature, performance studies, classical reception studies, and American social history.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004346383_013

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use of the novel for spiritual instruction, on the basis of Christianity as it was represented in the novel. Wallace gradually gained a tripartite public persona as a scholar educating Americans about the ancient Near East, a convert to Christianity as a result of composing Ben-Hur, and a warrior for American political and ideological unity (as a former Union general in the American Civil War). After his death, Wallace was compared to Homer and Vergil as having achieved literary ‘immortality’ with his so-called divinely inspired text.3 Wallace worked to reinforce this public image for the rest of his life. He performed an extensive series of lecture tours, corresponded with readers from a range of socio-economic, religious, and regional backgrounds, and compiled materials for an autobiography (published posthumously), whose introduction explains the author’s personal conviction in Christianity.4 The novel’s enthusiastic receivers created communities based upon a shared interpretation of the text, developed derivative art forms and activities on the basis of the text, produced and consumed entertainment inspired by the novel, and exhibited reverence for the work and its author. In cultural studies these behaviours are commonly associated with the phenomenon of fandom.5 The fandom surrounding Ben-Hur (1880) sustained the novel’s presence in the American cultural consciousness, and provided a primed audience for the novel’s adaptation into performance media.6 A significant number of testimonies from individual readers across the United States detailing their experience of the ‘Ben-Hur phenomenon’ survive in archives in Wallace’s home state of Indiana. When these sources are read in conversation with the invitations for emotional engagement provided in the literary text of Ben-Hur, it is possible to understand meaningfully the remarkable scale of the novel’s success in the United States, a success that carries at its heart personal, affective experiences of reading. The first component of this chapter will evaluate invitations for emotional engagement in the novel. Theoretical approaches to emotions in historical fiction and American biblical fiction will aid the investigation of Wallace’s motivation of readers to perceive ethnographically coded models of emotional behaviour exhibited by Roman, Jewish, and proto-Christian characters. The 3  Unknown author, “Lew Wallace”, Herald of Gospel Liberty 98 (4 May 1905) 273. 4  Lew Wallace, Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906) 2. 5  For the characteristics of fan cultures, see Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 2013). 6  Howard Miller, “The Charioteer and the Christ: Ben-Hur in America from the Gilded Age to the Culture Wars”, Indiana Magazine of History, 104.2 (2008) 153–75 describes the role of readers and audiences in stimulating performance adaptations of Ben-Hur.

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reader navigates these models alongside protagonist Judah Ben-Hur, who undergoes emotional and spiritual change throughout his social transformation from Jewish prince to slave to Roman aristocrat to Christian convert. Secondly, this chapter will examine some ways in which these invitations for emotional engagement in the text were received and espoused by specific communities of readership in the United States following the novel’s publication. This chapter will thereby demonstrate the importance of emotions as facilitating a deeply rooted, personal connection with the biblical-historical narrative of the ancient world in Ben-Hur. 1

Emotions in the Novel

In a lecture delivered in the early 1890s entitled ‘How I Came to Write Ben-Hur’, Lew Wallace professed his original intention to ‘show the religious and political condition of the world at the time of the coming’7 in Ben-Hur. The author’s following reflection on structuring a historical narrative around interactions between the inhabitants of Roman-occupied Judaea during the life of Christ indicates his interest in establishing models of emotional behaviour for ethnographic groups featured in his narrative: ‘The commitment to the galley, the sea-fight, the chariot-race and its preceding orgies were the Roman phases; just as the love marking the Hur family, the steady pursuit of vengeance by the son, and his easy conversion by Simonides to the alluring idea of the Messiah ruler like Caesar, were Jewish’.8 Within Wallace’s statement there emerges a distinction between Romans and Jews in these ethnographic ‘phases’ of the narrative, a distinction observable in the plurality of ‘emotion’ words in Wallace’s description of the ‘Jewish’ phase, and the lack of emotions in his description of the ‘Roman’ phase. Another noteworthy element is the individualism, the specificity of character Wallace highlights in his description of the ‘Jewish’ phase that is absent in the ‘Roman’ phase, which is instead qualified by a specificity of scenes. Ben-Hur maintains a careful, consistent attribution of specific patterns of emotional behaviour to individual characters, whose emotions, religiosity, and moral deci­ sions are explicitly associated with the group to which they belong. Wallace often identifies the degree of psychological relatability of characters from the viewpoint of the nineteenth-century reader. This can be seen early on in the novel, when Jewish protagonist Judah Ben-Hur falls out with his friend, the 7  Reproduced in Wallace (1906) 931. 8  Wallace (1906) 931–2.

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Roman Messala, who becomes the primary antagonist. Wallace appeals to his readers’ sympathy with Ben-Hur in the face of Messala’s condescending remarks about Jews in Jerusalem: ‘The superior airs assumed had been offensive to him in the beginning; soon they became irritating, and at last an acute smart. Anger lies close by this point in all of us …’ (Ben-Hur, 85).9 In the same instance, Wallace attributes Ben-Hur’s emotional experience to his ethnic and religious background in the historical context: ‘To the Jew of the Herodian period patriotism was a savage passion scarcely hidden under his common humour, and so related to his history, religion, and God that it responded instantly to derision of them’ (Ben-Hur, 85). The cultural value system Wallace ascribes to Jews in this period appears to be in sympathy with that of American readers, for whom patriotism was commonly associated with religion, particularly when westward territorial expansion was aligned with the spread of Christianity in the ideal of Manifest Destiny.10 Yet Ben-Hur’s ‘savage passion’ indicates a baseness in his emotional relationship to this value system. Wallace also directs his readers’ attention to the psychological distance between the villain Messala and themselves, by placing Messala’s psychology within the historical context of the narrative. The notable difference from Ben-Hur’s characterisation above is that the reader is not permitted alignment with Messala’s personal psychological deliberations, but is directed to observe the antiquatedness of Messala’s thoughts and feelings, which are explained as resultant from the idiosyncracies of his ethnic identity. Thus Wallace underscores the foreignness of ‘Roman’ emotional behaviour to nineteenth-century American sensibilities: ‘[the reader] must be reminded that reverence as a quality of the Roman mind was fast breaking down … The old religion had nearly ceased to be a faith … The young Messala … had caught the habit and manner …’ (Ben-Hur, 82). Messala’s lack of reverence sets him up to be a force in opposition to Ben-Hur’s spiritually guided moral determination, with which the reader is aligned at an early stage in the narrative. Messala’s refusal to accept Ben-Hur’s innocence in the accidental injury of the Roman governor of Judaea, and his ruthless condemnation of his childhood friend to slavery and the Hur family to imprisonment, are caused by the Roman cultural system in which he operates, which subordinates familial love and personal loyalty to military ambitions.

9   All page numbers cited for Ben-Hur come from (ed.) David Mayer, Ben-Hur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 10  Richard Hamilton, President McKinley, War, and Empire. Vol 2: President McKinley and America’s “New Empire” (London: Transaction Publishers, 2007) 44–5.

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Inconsistencies in the reader’s vantage point of culturally defined, versus universal emotions of Wallace’s characters may seem problematic. Yet, this regularly vacillating exhibition and denial of the foreignness of the historical setting would not have been unusual in contemporary historical novels. As Simon Goldhill has noted, ‘there is a telling lack … of any consistent attempt to maintain the frame of fiction. Rather, constant attention is drawn to … the negotiated and constructed distance between present and past’.11 Moreover, Wallace’s direction for his readers to negotiate continually their affective relationship with the historical narrative through alignment with or alienation from characters resonates with a fundamental feature of historical fiction apparent in novels written in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott. Scott, whom Wallace claimed to have emulated,12 commented on the tension between universal and historicised emotional experience which the medium of historical fiction consciously strives to reconcile. In his dedicatory epistle prefacing Ivanhoe (1821), Scott describes that in his character development there exists a ‘large proportion … of manners and sentiments which are common to us and to our ancestors.…’13 Elsewhere in the preface he indicates a special effort to design, or in his words, translate the emotional experience of his fictional inhabitants of the historical setting to invoke the sympathy of nineteenth-century readers.14 Critical theorist Georg Lukács calls this strategy of rendering characters from the past emotionally accessible to readers in the nineteenth-century Scott’s ‘necessary anachronism’ that ‘consists … simply in allowing his characters to express feelings and thoughts about real, historical relationships in a much clearer way than the actual men and women of the time could have done’.15 In Ben-Hur, Wallace employs and subverts the ‘necessary anachronism’, and engages meaningfully with the question of an author’s role in fabricating ‘ancient’ emotions, whether seemingly universal or culturally associated. These dynamics of emotion are not executed haphazardly in Ben-Hur, for they are incorporated in the service of a greater moralising purpose that has everything to do with the novel as a ‘Tale of the Christ’. The behaviour of Roman and Jewish characters in Ben-Hur frequently exhibits a link between emotional 11  Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) 184. 12  Wallace (1906) 63. 13  Walter Scott, Ivanhoe: A Romance, Volume 1 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1821) xviii. 14  Scott (1821) xvii. 15  Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1962) 63.

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experience, religious faith (or distinct lack thereof), and moral determination. Wallace juxtaposes these ethnographically determined psychological complexes with one another and with the Christian experience of emotion, faith, and morality that Judah Ben-Hur finds through his encounters with Christ and proto-Christian characters in the novel, most notably the Magus Balthasar, who was present at Christ’s Nativity. This culminates in the author’s invitation for the reader to experience the greatest degree of alignment with Ben-Hur at the moment of his Christian conversion. Throughout the novel, consistent attention is drawn to the Jewishness of Ben-Hur’s emotions and morality, and the ways in which he justifies his emotions and moral decisions according to his interpretation of Mosaic Law. The social connotation Wallace ascribes to the link between emotions, Law, and morality is initially positive, but becomes gradually negative as the novel progresses. When Ben-Hur as a galley slave saves Roman tribune Quintus Arrius from suicide following a naval battle, his invocation of the Law is unequivocally heroic. For Arrius, the only morally admirable Roman in Ben-Hur, the strength of Rome lies in the honour of its citizens. Thus, when he and Ben-Hur are holding onto a scrap of wood from the wrecked ship, contemplating the outcome of the battle, Arrius declares that he would rather die than submit to dishonour and live if the Romans have lost. For Arrius, there is an unbearable sense of shame that accompanies a betrayal of his value of Roman virtus admired and emulated by the American revolutionaries of the 1770s.16 However, Arrius is deterred from suicide by the intervention of Ben-Hur, whose system of moral determination, derived from the Law, prevents him from letting Arrius die: ‘The Law, which is to me most binding, O tribune, would make me answerable for thy life’ (Ben-Hur, 156–7.). After it is revealed that the Romans did prevail in the battle, Ben-Hur is rewarded for his moral instincts, and is liberated from slavery and adopted as the son of Arrius. Prior to Ben-Hur’s defeat of Messala in the chariot race in Antioch, the Law operates as a grounding spiritual principle and source of moral guidance for Ben-Hur as he journeys to find his family. While in Antioch, Ben-Hur explores the Grove of Daphne, a site of pagan hedonistic spectacle, and finds a young couple embracing on a tiger skin beneath a statue of Daphne. His response to this sight forces him to reconcile his awakening sexual desire with his religious sensibilities, which can be read according to Wallace’s capitalisation of ‘Law’ (used to refer to Mosaic Law elsewhere in the novel): ‘The exposure startled him. Back in the hush of the perfumed thicket he discovered, as he thought, that the charm of the great Grove was peace without fear …; now, in this sleep 16  Malamud (2009) 9–11.

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in the day’s broad glare … The law of the place was Love, but Love without Law’ (Ben-Hur, 192–3). This reflection on the operation of the Law reminds Ben-Hur of the divinely sanctioned love he longs to regain at the reunion of his family, and he refuses to let himself be tempted by the pleasures of the moment in the face of his family’s still unknown whereabouts. Wallace associates familial love with Jewish religiosity, particularly exhibited by Ben-Hur’s mother, at various points in the narrative.17 As the chariot race approaches, bearing the resolution of the central conflict between Ben-Hur and Messala, Wallace begins to alter the primary manifestation of Jewish emotional experience. He introduces vengeance as a characteristically ‘Jewish’ emotion, justified by the Law and associated with the theological interpretation of the Messiah as an initiator of social and political change in Judaea. Simonides, wealthy merchant and loyal slave of the Hur family, harbours vengeful feelings against the Romans for abuse he incurred from them, and fosters Ben-Hur’s growing conviction that he should support the new King of the Jews in the attempt (as perceived by Simonides) to crush Rome. Simonides affirms that ‘revenge is a Jew’s of right; it is the law’ (Ben-Hur, 313). Simonides functions as the rhetorical antithesis of Balthasar, whose message of the Messiah as a spiritual saviour shifts Ben-Hur’s theological perspective, and prepares him for Christian conversion. When Ben-Hur meets Balthasar, he experiences internal conflict between the appeal of a ‘national liberty’ achieved through force of arms, and the idea that contradicts Messala’s mantra of ‘Down Eros, Up Mars!’, namely ‘Love is better and mightier than Force’ (Ben-Hur, 263). Ben-Hur reflects, ‘Life had been crowded with griefs and with vengeful preparations—too much crowded for love. Was this the beginning of a happy change?’ (263–4). After Ben-Hur wins the chariot race and his desire for personal revenge is resolved, he experiences neither sympathy for Messala, who is now crippled and penniless, nor remorse for the magnitude of the ruin he has dealt his foe. Wallace introduces a distinction between the Jewish paradigm and the ‘purely Christian nature’ that precipitates Christian supercessionism:

17  Jewish familial love in Ben-Hur is defined, in part, by the central importance of the preservation of genealogical records of the survival of the religious community. Ben-Hur’s mother demonstrates this when she narrates the magnificent lineage of the Jewish people to her son (Ben-Hur, 105–6). See Milette Shamir, “Ben-Hur’s Mother: Narrative Time, Nostalgia, and Progress in the Protestant Historical Romance”, in Barbara Ryan and Milette Shamir (eds.) (2016) 33–51 for another reading of Ben-Hur’s mother within a paradigm of cultural nostalgia in the historical novel.

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Henceforth [Ben-Hur] was to be the aggressor.… To the purely Christian nature the presentation would have brought the weakness of remorse. Not so with Ben-Hur; his spirit had its emotions from the teachings of the first lawgiver, not the last and greatest one. He had dealt punishment, not wrong, to Messala. By permission of the Lord he had triumphed. Ben-Hur, 358

In this passage the reader is seemingly expected to be familiar with compassion and remorse characteristic of ‘purely Christian nature’. The concept of Jewish triumph ‘by permission of the Lord’ thus rings emotionally distant and foreign, with Wallace’s explanation that ‘[Ben-Hur’s] spirit had its emotions from the teachings of the first lawgiver, not the last and greatest one’. The manner of vengeance Ben-Hur deals Messala in the chariot race also ties into circulating negative stereotyping of Jewish business dealings in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Prior to the chariot race Ben-Hur sends his associate Sanballat to entice Messala to wager his entire fortune on his own victory in the competition. Wallace’s decision to represent Ben-Hur’s victory, at least in part, as an appropriation of Messala’s fortune through crafty business dealings made through a clever associate invokes familiar stereotypes that contributed to the social alienation of Jews during the time of Wallace’s writing.18 At the same time, in keeping with the ‘necessary anachronism’ of the historical novel, Wallace needed to render his protagonist emotionally and ideologically accessible to (mostly Protestant) American readers. Ben-Hur’s ‘otherness’ on the basis of his Jewish identity could not be pronounced to the extent that the majority of readers would find it impossible to cultivate sympathy for him before the point of his conversion. In fact, Wallace’s anchoring of his narrative within a Jewish perspective allowed for contemporary discourse in American Protestantism promoting identification with the people of Israel in their historical struggle for religious and political freedom to be channeled through the 18  Howard Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Knopf, 1992) 72–79. See also Rowena Olegario, “ ‘That Mysterious People’: Jewish Merchants, Transparency, and Community in Mid-Nineteenth Century America”, The Business History Review 73.2 (1999) 165. Ruth Scodel, “The 1925 Ben-Hur and the ‘Hollywood Question’ ”, in Pantelis Michelakis and Maria Wyke (eds.) The Ancient World in Silent Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 323 considers director Fred Niblo’s approach to the outcome of the chariot race in his 1925 film production of the novel, where Messala is not crippled, but killed. Scodel suggests that the combination of an influential Jewish presence in the Hollywood film industry with the trend for Hollywood films to avoid controversial themes at that time perhaps contributed to this change in Wallace’s original narrative, for ‘rendering an enemy penniless might seem to be a stereotypically Jewish vengeance’.

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character of Ben-Hur.19 Moreover, if Ben-Hur is read as a work borrowing from the conventions of American biblical fiction, a sympathetic Jewish protagonist is important to maintain in the service of the Christian devotional function of the novel’s religious episodes. Wallace’s historical narrative is bracketed by a tale of Christ’s life, wherein the Nativity and the Crucifixion constitute the opening and closing events of the book. Where the two narratives regularly overlap, and eventually culminate, is in Ben-Hur’s conversion to Christianity. Although Wallace avoided aligning himself publicly with a specific church or religious denomination,20 the rendering of the religious episodes in Ben-Hur carries stylistic reminiscences of American biblical fiction, a genre consumed almost exclusively in the United States by evangelical Protestant communities who were often discouraged from reading novels apart from those written specifically for Christian devotion.21 Whether or not Wallace intended to write for this audience, his Life of Christ narrative brought him readers who reported encounters with the novel characterised by a Christian devotional experience similar to that encouraged by biblical fiction novels of the time. Biblical fiction novels promulgated a crucial element of the evangelical Protestant model of social and emotional behaviour during the Great Awakening in the latter half of the nineteenth century, namely the promotion of Christ as an emotionally accessible, gentle companion. The idea of Christ as a ‘personal saviour’, and the search for the humanness of the ‘historical Christ’ overwhelmed doctrinal sub-divisions and emerged as the cornerstone of American Protestantism.22 Biblical fiction for the most part focused on the life of Christ and the early history of Christianity, unifying the experience of American Christianity grounded in biblical ‘origins’.23 Churches often performed readings of biblical fiction novels.24 The rhetoric of these novels was rooted in the tradition of revival sermons that originated in the eighteenth century, and featured ‘aesthetics of immediacy: visual language, 19  Malamud (2009) 141–2. 20  Wallace (1906) 2. 21  David Morgan, Visual Piety: History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (London: University of California Press, 1999) 84. These proscriptions often came from organisations such as the American Bible Society (1816) and the American Tract Society (1825) that had emerged to promote Christianity in strong association with American patriotism. 22  Morgan, Visual Piety (1999) 82; Miller (2008) 154–5. 23  David Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America. (London: Harvard University Press, 1981) 2. 24  Paul Gutjahr, “Historical and Cultural Contexts: Religion”, in Shirley Samuels (ed.), A Companion to American Fiction 1780–1865 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) 90–1.

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the personalization of religious narrative, and the evocation of intense emotions … to foster readers’ identification with protagonists struggling for moral control and spiritual transcendence’.25 Biblical fiction frequently featured conversion narratives, revolving around Jewish protagonists who encounter Christ personally. In Sarah Pogson Smith’s Zerah, the Believing Jew (1837), a skeptical Jew witnesses Christ’s miracles, and, as Ben-Hur does, his Crucifixion. Thereupon Zerah converts to Christianity and undergoes the harsh existence of an early Christian under the oppressive might of Roman rule, such as bearing witness to the martyrdoms of Paul and Peter (although this works to strengthen Zerah’s Christian conviction, for he receives these visions with ‘solemn awe’) (Zerah, the Believing Jew, 274). Within biblical fiction an effort is sustained to preserve consistency with the Bible in Christ’s appearances, miracles, and statements.26 Wallace likewise maintains respect for the sanctity of Christ’s words, which are unaltered in Ben-Hur. Christ’s life is then witnessed from the perspective of a fictional protagonist, who is written into the biblical context. Wallace conforms to both of these features of biblical fiction by incorporating Christ’s quotations directly from the Bible and by writing Judah Ben-Hur into the Bible as the young man who flees the Garden of Gethsemane after Christ’s betrayal by Judas (Ben-Hur, 494; Mark 14: 51–2).27 Wallace’s characterisation of Christ, particularly concerning the balance between his humanity and divinity (‘to the heart divinely original, yet so human in all the better elements of humanity’; 467) serves as a focal point of the audience’s solicited devotional attention. When Ben-Hur meets Christ for the second time, after many years’ passing between their initial encounter during Ben-Hur’s enslavement, Ben-Hur studies Christ’s facial features, which communicate powerful emotions: …[there] beamed eyes dark-blue and large, and softened to exceeding tenderness by lashes of great length sometimes seen on children, but sel­ 25  Gregory Jackson, “Religion and the Nineteenth Century American Novel”, in Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby, and Benjamin Reiss (eds.) The Cambridge History of the American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 169. 26  Reynolds (1981) 136. Other novels that feature a Jew’s process of conversion to Christianity through direct encounters with Christ include James Freeman Clarke’s The Legend of Thomas Didymus: The Jewish Sceptic (1881), and Caroline Atwater Mason’s The Quiet King: A Story of Christ (1896). 27  See Jefferson Gatrall, “Retelling and Untelling the Christmas Story”, in Barbara Ryan and Milette Shamir (2016) 52–73 for further discussion of Ben-Hur operating within the tradition of late-nineteenth-century ‘Jesus novels’.

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dom, if ever, on men … The features … were ruled by a certain expression which, as the viewer chose, might with equal correctness have been called the effect of intelligence, love, pity, or sorrow … the results of a consciousness of strength to bear suffering … Ben-Hur, 438–9

Wallace encourages his reader to participate in this prolonged meditation, which is in keeping with nineteenth-century American evangelical devotional practices. David Morgan describes the interest among evangelical Protestant communities in recovering the ‘face of the historical Christ’, and the widespread practice of ‘visual piety’ that emphasised ‘the face … communicative of emotion, thoughts, and sensation’ as an agent of devotion.28 Moreover, Wallace’s definition of the delicacy and feminine quality of the features, and the gentleness and emotional transparency of Christ, echoes the model Morgan elsewhere has observed of the ‘Christology visualized and promulgated by the American Tract Society … [which] stressed the accessibility, sympathy, and benevolence of Christ.’29 The detail of Christ’s blue eyes is reminiscent of a specific physiognomy that was circulating throughout the nineteenth century in accordance with that detailed in a letter written to the Roman Senate from Publius Lentulus, allegedly a Roman official and contemporary of Pontius Pilate, based in Judaea. The letter was often reproduced in an English translation, and from 1857 to 1872 the American printmaking firm Currier and Ives published a portrait of Christ according to the physical characteristics communicated in the letter, and titled it ‘The True Portrait of our Blessed Savior’.30 Wallace’s inclusion of Christ’s blue eyes resonated with such ‘historically accurate’ images of Christ that were disseminated throughout Protestant communities in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The reader is offered a view of Christ’s primary emotions, namely love, pity, and sorrow that differs from the granted points of access to Ben-Hur’s psychology. The reader gazes into Christ’s face, and is not privy to Christ’s thoughts. The reader is thus invited to cultivate a sympathetic relationship with Christ, 28  David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 283, 303; David Morgan, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (London: University of California Press, 2012) 91–2. 29  David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005) 204. 30  The text of the letter is reproduced in Morgan, Protestants and Pictures (1999) 284. Wallace did not cite Lentulus’ letter as a source for his depiction (Gatrall, 2016: 70).

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whose divinity sets him out of reach of the reader’s ability to be truly omniscient as to his cognitive determination. The element of Christ’s characterisation in Ben-Hur most crucial to the predominant ways in which Wallace’s Christian readers would profess their emotional engagement with the novel is the depiction of Christ as a personal saviour at the Crucifixion, the site of Ben-Hur’s conversion. Wallace renders Ben-Hur’s conversion internal, highly emotional, and featuring a dialogue with Christ, who is interpreted as a ‘guide’ between earth and the heavenly kingdom: Ben-Hur was conscious of a change in his feelings. A conception of something better than the best of this life—… perhaps the spirit-life … began to dawn upon his mind … bringing to him a certain sense that … the mission of the Nazarene was that of guide … across the boundary to where His kingdom was set up and waiting for Him. Then … he heard … the saying of the Nazarene, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” And the words repeated themselves over and over, and took form, and the dawn touched them with its light, and filled them with a new meaning … [Ben-Hur] asked, gazing at the figure on the hill fainting under its crown, Who is the Resurrection, and who the Life? “I Am”, the figure seemed to say—and to say it for him; for instantly he was sensible of a peace such as he had never known—the peace which is the end of doubt and mystery, and the beginning of faith and love and clear understanding. Ben-Hur, 505–6

In order to understand the distinctive emotional immediacy of Ben-Hur’s experience of conversion, it is profitable to compare Wallace’s conversion narrative with an account of conversion from another historical novel set in the firstcentury Roman empire that enjoyed considerable interest among American readers and was often compared to Ben-Hur by critics: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). In Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, protagonist Glaucus announces his affiliation with Christianity in a letter to his friend Sallust, ten years after the destruction of Pompeii, from which he had escaped: I have pondered much over that faith--I have adopted it.… In my preservation from the lion and the earthquake [Olinthus] taught me to behold the hand of the unknown God! I listened—believed—adored! My own, my more than ever beloved Ione, has also embraced the creed!—a creed, Sallust, which, shedding light over this world, gathers its concentrated glory, like a sunset, over the next! We know that we are united in the soul, as in the flesh, for ever and for ever! The Last Days of Pompeii, 304

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The first point of comparison between the two narratives is the temporal immediacy of the conversion experience for Ben-Hur. Glaucus writes to Sallust ten years after the eruption. It is unclear whether he interprets the eruption as divine punishment for non-believers, a belief the Christians he encounters in Pompeii seem to adopt.31 In any case, he seems to have reached conversion through an intellectualisation of his experiences, and (with the help of his Christian friend Olinthus) a rational belief in the Christian God through his experiences of rescue from the lion to which he was about to be fed in the arena, and from the eruption.32 Additionally, the medium of communication (a letter) distances the reader from Glaucus’ emotional experience at his conversion. Glaucus’ comparison of Christianity to a sunset, as a means for believers to transition between the earthly and the heavenly realms, provides an interesting contrast to Ben-Hur’s perception of the dawn coinciding with the words he hears from Christ, the personal saviour and conveyor of souls from earth to heaven. When these accounts of conversion are considered side-by-side, Wallace’s intimate, emotionally-laden narrative of the determined moment of conversion as a Christian triumph becomes particularly distinctive. It provides the crowning element of the supremacy the author assigns to the Christian experience of emotion, religious faith, and moral determination, when compared to the ‘Roman’ or even the ‘Jewish’ phases of the novel. In Wallace’s epilogue, Ben-Hur and his wife and fellow convert Esther manifest their lasting commitment to Christian faith by demonstrating acts of charity in the domestic and public realms of influence American Protestantism assigns to their respective genders.33 Esther receives Messala’s former mistress Iras as a visitor into their home, and insists, ‘[My husband] has no feeling against you … He will be your friend. I will be your friend. We are Christians’ (518). Ben-Hur does not appear 31  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii (London: Richard Bentley, 1834) 275–6: ‘They had long believed, according to the error of the early Christians, that the Last Day was at hand; they imagined now that the Day had come. “Woe! woe!” cried, in a shrill and piercing voice, the elder at their head. “Behold! the Lord descendeth to judgment! He maketh fire come down from heaven in the sight of men! … Woe to ye of the fasces and the purple! Woe to the idolater and the worshipper of the beast!” ’ See Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul, “Introduction: Ruins and reconstructions”, in Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul (eds.) Pompeii in the Public Imagination from Its Rediscovery to Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 13 for further discussion of this passage. 32  See Malamud (2009: 124–5) for discussion of the employment of apocalyptic themes in American evangelical sermons, and implications of the reception of the eruption scenes in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel among American readers. 33  Jay Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 88.

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with the women in this domestic scene, yet Wallace assures his reader that Ben-Hur’s Christian sympathy is manifested through a public gesture—the donation of his fortune to Christians living in Rome under Nero. This act of Christian charity provides a stark contrast to Ben-Hur’s former refusal to show mercy to Messala and return his fortune to him prior to his conversion. It is readily appreciable that Wallace incorporated narrative devices from the historical novel tradition, and features in sympathy with American biblical fiction, in order to appeal to a wide range of potential readers. With the innovative merging of these two genres, Wallace invited readers in the United States with evolving social, political, and religious beliefs, and differing perspectives on the United States’ relationship to Rome, Judaism, and Christianity, to engage with his novel on a number of levels. 2

American Responses to the Novel

Archival sources reveal distinct patterns of responses from readers to Ben-Hur (1880), including uses of the novel and derivative works (lectures, staged readings, etc.) in entertainment, religious, educational, and other contexts.34 The evidence demonstrates that readers, particularly those self-identified members of Protestant communities, responded to the novel’s invitations for emotional engagement primarily on the basis of the novel’s Christian episodes, and constructed or sought out communities of reception in which they could share this experience of emotional engagement. The archival material mentioned here covers a period of three decades following the novel’s publication, the beginning of the ‘Ben-Hur phenomenon’, during which time there occurs the highest concentration of testimonies of emotional response to the novel. This material includes correspondence between Lew Wallace and readers, newspaper articles and reviews, a Sunday school programme, and publications associated with the Supreme Tribe of Ben-Hur. Since the focus of the analysis of emotions in the text centred on Ben-Hur’s clear emotional appeals to Protestant readership, the responses featured here will reflect the function of Ben-Hur in contexts associated with Protestantism. While both favourable and unfavourable impressions of Ben-Hur from Catholic and Jewish readers, as well as readers with secular interest in the novel, are represented in published discourse and in private correspondence 34  Jon Solomon, “The Music of Ben-Hur”, Syllecta Classica 23 (2012) 153–78 discusses a kind of musical narrative tradition that accompanied the various literary and performance adaptations of Ben-Hur.

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with Wallace, these are in the minority, and present space does not allow the issues raised in these sources to be expounded to their full merit. Two broad trends in the activities of Protestant reading communities are observable from the sources featured here. ‘Appreciators’ testify to the experience of engaging emotionally with the novel through passive reading or listening. ‘Conveyors’ profess motivation to create a derivative product inspired by the novel designed at least in part to enhance other readers’ emotional engagement with Ben-Hur through the presentation of the story in new media. Within these patterns of audience response emerges readers’ emotional engagement with the perceived persona(s) of author Lew Wallace. Jon Solomon mentions with respect to the author’s 1906 autobiography Wallace’s tendency to ‘self-mythologise’,35 or embellish the narration of his life in order to refine his celebrity image in accordance with circulating public perceptions of him. It is possible to observe the extent to which readers’ desire to understand Wallace’s authorial intentions challenged the author to negotiate the manifestation of this persona shortly after Ben-Hur was published in 1880. In his lecture, ‘How I Came to Write Ben-Hur’, delivered throughout the 1890s Wallace proclaimed that he had written the novel as an exploration and ultimately a confirmation of his Christian faith.36 The final chapters of Wallace’s autobiography, compiled by his wife Susan after her husband’s death, reproduce letters from readers testifying to the impact of Ben-Hur on their lives.37 During this time when public interest in the personal life and motivations of an author was pronounced, this sort of legacy, built upon the author’s personal contacts with readers, would have been significant.38 The New York Times review39 produced two days following the novel’s publication poses questions of the relationship between generic influence, authorial intention, and audience response. The reviewer draws attention to a discrepancy between Wallace’s initial claim that his novel was not intended to serve a religious function and the author’s apparent emulation of narrative models from American biblical fiction: ‘The Gospel story has frequently been paraphrased and rewritten, but usually in books of a devotional character …’. This review suggests that biblical fiction was a recognised genre that served a concrete religious purpose within Christian reading communities. It is worth 35  Jon Solomon, “The Classical Sources of Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur”, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 22.1 (2015) 32. 36  Solomon (2016) 46. 37  Wallace (1906) 947–56. 38  Goldhill (2011) 250. 39  Unknown author, “A Story of the East” New York Times. (14 November 1880) 4.

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noting that, according to the article’s comments on Wallace’s professed intentions for his work, Wallace at this early stage seems to have been publicly identifying Ben-Hur as belonging to the genre of historical fiction rather than that of biblical fiction. Reviews from Protestant publications and letters from individual Christian readers describe an enhanced experience of religious devotion through reading Ben-Hur. A review dated December 1880 from the Saturday Review in Indianapolis40 encourages Christians to validate and reinforce their faith through cultivating a greater proximity to religious origins in the reading of the novel: ‘The book is literally a “Tale of the Christ”, for it gives to the sublime verities of our holy religion a social and historical setting, so fit to the time, place and circumstances in which they were revealed to mankind’. This use of Ben-Hur as a tool for stimulating religious fervor is taken to another level in readers’ reports of Christian conversion. Readers and professional reviewers of the novel affirm the status of Ben-Hur as an agent for leading non-believers into the faith. Two highly emotive reports of conversion in letters from male readers sent to Wallace in 1886 and 188741 echo the desire for, or manifestation of, comfort found in a religious community, into which each has declared himself initiated by Ben-Hur. Nicholas Smith (1886) of Janesville, Wisconsin cites specific passages from the novel that facilitated his conversion experience: ‘The touching scene of the Carpenter’s son giving Ben-Hur a drink of water, the searching for the mother and Tirzah at Jerusalem, the healing of their leprosy by Christ, and the matchless story of the crucifixion made a wonderful impression on me’. Both readers also mention an ongoing emotional struggle (the 1887 letter from Geo Parrish in Kewanee, Illinois indicates that this was a result of social marginalisation) experienced prior to the conversion experience. The conversion derived through the reading of Ben-Hur is reported to have brought relief through an initiation into an emotional community determined by affiliation with a (Protestant) church. Protestant periodicals also promoted Ben-Hur’s powers of conversion. The Herald of Gospel Liberty declared, ‘Many a preacher can speak with … an elegance of gesture, a correctness of intonation, an invincibility of argument … and never have a convert. We do not regard such a person as a great preacher; though the critics might approve him. He is a great preacher 40   J.W. Gordon, Review of Ben-Hur, Saturday Review (27 December 1880). Accessed via Papers of Susan and Lew Wallace (Series 1, Reel 31), Indiana Historical Society. 41  Nicholas Smith, Letter to Lew Wallace (22 March 1886). Wallace MSS. II (1865–1884), Lilly Library; Geo R. Parrish, Letter to Lew Wallace (1 January 1887). Wallace MSS. II (1865– 1884), Lilly Library.

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who influences his audience to turn to Christ’.42 This source touches on the growing status of Ben-Hur as a quasi-religious text, drawing converts sometimes more effectively than the Bible itself. ‘Conveyors’ of Ben-Hur employed the novel for instructive purposes in educational43 and religious contexts, the latter phenomenon demonstrated by a Sunday school programme published in the Boston-based Zion’s Herald (10 April 1889).44 The programme includes the meditation for the day, or the ‘Golden Text’: ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s’ (Matthew 22:22). In the ‘illustrative’ section of this Sunday school lesson, there is a citation of Wallace’s description of his own inquiry into God’s existence, his conversion to Christianity, and his authoring Ben-Hur: “The result of my long study was the absolute conviction that Jesus of Nazareth was not only a Christ and the Christ, but he was also my Christ, my Saviour, and my Redeemer. That fact once settled in my own mind, I wrote “Ben Hur” ’. Of the conveyors who aspired to enhance the emotional experience of BenHur’s readers, there is no clearer example than The Supreme Tribe of BenHur. In 1894 the Tribe was founded in Wallace’s hometown of Crawfordsville, Indiana by David Washington Gerard and others with backgrounds in insurance, law, and politics.45 The Tribe gained permission from Wallace and Harper and Brothers to use the name Ben-Hur,46 and emulated the structure of the Maccabees, a Canadian fraternal order and profitable insurance organisation.47 While such societies provided numerous leisure, business, networking, and insurance benefits, the core of their widespread success in the United States during the nineteenth century was their ability to provide remote or frontier

42  Unknown author, “Lew Wallace”, Herald of Gospel Liberty 98.18 (4 May 1905) 273. 43  Elizabeth Little (teacher at Janesville, Wisconsin School for the Blind), Letter to Lew Wallace. (12 March 1886). Wallace MSS. II (1865–1884), Lilly Library. 44   W.O. Holway. “The Sunday School”, Zion’s Herald 67.15 (10 April 1889) 119. 45  David Gerard Iliff, The Lost Tribe of Ben-Hur (Indianapolis: Fall Creek Review, 1994) 42. 46  Bridgie Hackstaff, Lew Wallace: Father of Ben-Hur (Crawfordsville: Montgomery County Historical. Society, 1980) 37–8. 47  The Maccabees may have also served as a model for the Tribe because of the origin of their name, given to the Jews who revolted against their Syrian Greek rulers of Judaea in 167–141 BCE (Louis Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 92). In Ben-Hur, following a fight between Galileans and Romans prior to Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem, Wallace describes the renewed morale of the Jews, among whom ‘old tales of the Maccabees were told again’ (Ben-Hur, 408).

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communities with crucial economic, social, and spiritual resources for survival through a pragmatic model of interdependency.48 While the Supreme Tribe of Ben-Hur enjoyed particular success as an insurance organisation,49 as a ‘conveyor’ of derivative performances and interpretations of Wallace’s novel it generated a special community of reception. The Tribe consciously employed the novel’s ‘moral teachings’ and Christian sentiment as an inspiration for the founding of a community of readers-turnedenactors of the novel. While the activities of other fraternal organisations in the nineteenth-century United States were shrouded in secrecy, the Supreme Tribe of Ben-Hur, although it had secret rituals, contained one element that rendered its motives accessible to many: ‘The public felt it already knew what Ben-Hur was all about. The tribe was non-political, democratic and non-sectarian, though obviously Christian.’50 ‘Obviously Christian’ clearly qualified the requirements for inclusion in the Tribe: ‘… all acceptable white persons of good moral character, sound bodily health and of good reputation and who believe in a Supreme Being’.51 While the notion of ‘Supreme Being’ may appear to be ambiguous here, the ‘Spectacular Degree’ from 1904 reads, ‘Our order is founded upon “Tale of the Christ” and the teachings of the Nazarene is its chief cornerstone … you should study the Holy Bible and the book “Ben-Hur” that you may catch the spirit and emulate the example of the grand men and women who, from the manger to the cross, knew the world’s redeemer’.52 The Tribe’s initiation ritual contributes significantly to the understanding of the ways in which ‘conveyors’ of Ben-Hur engaged with and transformed Wallace’s invitations for emotional engagement through derivative productions. This ritual included role-play, wherein members of the Tribe would appear as various characters from the novel, including Ben-Hur, his mother, his sister Tirzah, and Quintus Arrius, and would enact passages from Ben-Hur. The scenes include the recitation of the nobility of the Hur line performed by BenHur’s mother; the condemnation of Ben-Hur to the galleys; and the meeting of

48  Roger Burt, “Freemasonry and Business Networking During the Victorian Period”, The Economic History Review, New Series 56.4 (2003) 659, 672. 49  Iliff (1994) 12. 50  Iliff (1994) 15. 51  “Objects of the Order” in Souvenir Book, Supreme Tribe of Ben-Hur (undated), accessed at Crawfordsville District Public Library. The Tribe did not accept non-white members until 1970 (Iliff, 1994: 16). 52  Iliff (1994); this quotation appears on the inside front cover.

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Ben-Hur and Arrius, when Ben-Hur identifies himself and the unjust circumstances which resulted in his slavery. The point of initiation comes when the initiate observes the performance of the scene involving the slave Ben-Hur’s conversation with Arrius in the galley that eventually results in Ben-Hur’s freedom and adoption as a Roman citizen. The person in the role of Ben-Hur would remove his slave number 60, and hand it to the first candidate for initiation, who would place the number on himself/herself before being momentarily shackled to a bench and made to hold an oar. Thereupon, the initiate was ‘liberated’, and handed the number to the next initiate. This passage from the novel provides a metaphor of freedom from slavery to demonstrate the acceptance of an individual into a united social and spiritual community. Finally, the ‘chief’ presiding over the ceremony would deliver the following address: ‘Our aim is to foster and cherish the fraternal spirit and … to help each other in the great battle of life, and, in the event of death, to spread the broad shield of Benevolence over the stricken heads of our loved ones, and finally, as Ben-Hur was adopted by Arrius, so we hereby adopt you as ‘Sons and Daughters of Hur’ …53 The military metaphors used here (‘battle of life’, ‘shield of Benevolence’), combined with the invocation of Arrius as an exemplum for benevolent protection and honour, recall Wallace’s military background, and the themes of religion and war in Ben-Hur (Ben-Hur’s desire to be a warrior for Christ, for instance). This rhetoric reflects the emotional and spiritual fellowship of Tribe members founded in the tradition of fraternal organisations in the United States as interdependent communities of survival. Readers of Ben-Hur demonstrated long-lasting and profound engagement with the novel, particularly on the basis of the affective relationship they were invited to experience with the protagonist along his journey toward Christian salvation. Through its novel pairing of historical and biblical fiction, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) was extraordinary in its capacity to address interrelated moral, social, economic, and political anxieties in the United States following the Civil War and Reconstruction.54 By exploring relationships between Romans, Jews, and (proto-) Christians in the early Roman Empire, Ben-Hur appealed to distinctly American connotations of and associations with antiquity that influenced both Wallace’s treatment of them in his novel and his readers’ responses to them. 53  “Court Degree Ritual of the Tribe of Ben-Hur Containing the Court Degree Opening and Closing Ceremonies and the Installation Ceremonies” (1910), accessed at Crawfordsville District Public Library. 54  Miller (2008) 154–5.

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Bibliography Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, The Last Days of Pompeii (London: Richard Bentley, 1834). Burt, Roger, “Freemasonry and Business Networking During the Victorian Period”, The Economic History Review, New Series 56.4 (2003) 657–88. Gerard, D.W., “Court Degree Ritual of the Tribe of Ben-Hur Containing the Court Degree Opening and Closing Ceremonies and the Installation Ceremonies” (1910). Marian Morrison Local History Collection, Crawfordsville District Public Library. Dolan, Jay, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Feldman, Louis, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Gatrall, Jefferson, “Retelling and Untelling the Christmas Story”, in Barbara Ryan and Milette Shamir (eds.), Bigger Than Ben-Hur: The Book, Its Adaptations, and Their Audiences (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016) 52–73. Goldhill, Simon, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). Gordon, J.W., Review of Ben-Hur, Saturday Review (27 December 1880). Papers of Susan and Lew Wallace (Series 1, Reel 31), Indiana Historical Society. Gutjahr, Paul, “Historical and Cultural Contexts: Religion”, in Shirley Samuels (ed.), A Companion to American Fiction 1780–1865 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) 87–96. Hackstaff, Bridgie, Lew Wallace: Father of Ben-Hur (Crawfordsville: Montgomery County Historical Society, 1980). Hales, Shelley, and Joanna Paul, “Introduction: Ruins and reconstructions”, in Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul (eds.) Pompeii in the Public Imagination from Its Rediscovery to Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 1–14. Hamilton, Richard, President McKinley, War, and Empire. Vol 2: President McKinley and America’s “New Empire” (London: Transaction Publishers, 2007). Holway, W.O., “The Sunday School”, Zion’s Herald 67.15 (10 April 1889) 119. Iliff, David Gerard, The Lost Tribe of Ben-Hur (Indianapolis: Fall Creek Review, 1994). Jackson, Gregory, “Religion and the Nineteenth Century American Novel”, in Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby, and Benjamin Reiss (eds.) The Cambridge History of the American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 167–91. Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 2013). Little, Elizabeth, Unpublished letter to Lew Wallace. (12 March 1886). Wallace MSS. II (1865–1884), Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington. Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1962). Malamud, Margaret, Ancient Rome and Modern America (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

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Miller, Howard, “The Charioteer and the Christ: Ben-Hur in America from the Gilded Age to the Culture Wars”, Indiana Magazine of History, 104.2 (2008) 153–75. Morgan, David, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (London: University of California Press, 2012). Morgan, David, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005). Morgan, David, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Morgan, David, Visual Piety: History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (London: University of California Press, 1999). Olegario, Rowena, “ ‘That Mysterious People’: Jewish Merchants, Transparency, and Community in Mid-Nineteenth Century America”, The Business History Review 73.2 (1999) 161–89. Parrish, Geo R., Unpublished letter to Lew Wallace (1 January 1887). Wallace MSS. II (1865–1884), Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington. Pogson Smith, Sarah, Zerah, the Believing Jew (New York: New York Protestant Episcopal Press, 1837). Reynolds, David, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (London: Harvard University Press, 1981). Ryan, Barbara, and Milette Shamir (eds.), Bigger Than Ben-Hur: The Book, Its Adap­ tations, and Their Audiences (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016). Sachar, Howard, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Knopf, 1992). Scodel, Ruth, “The 1925 Ben-Hur and the ‘Hollywood Question’ ”, in Pantelis Michelakis and Maria Wyke (eds.) The Ancient World in Silent Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 313–29. Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe: A Romance, Volume 1 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1821). Shamir, Milette, “Ben-Hur’s Mother: Narrative Time, Nostalgia, and Progress in the Protestant Historical Romance”, in Barbara Ryan and Milette Shamir (eds.) Bigger Than Ben-Hur: The Book, Its Adaptations, and Their Audiences (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016) 33–51. Smith, Nicholas, Unpublished letter to Lew Wallace (22 March 1886). Wallace MSS. II (1865–1884), Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington. Solomon, Jon, Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Solomon, Jon, “The Classical Sources of Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur”, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 22.1 (2015) 29–75. Solomon, Jon, “The Music of Ben-Hur”, Syllecta Classica 23 (2012) 153–78. Unknown author, “A Story of the East”, New York Times (14 November 1880) 4. Unknown author, “Lew Wallace”, Herald of Gospel Liberty 98 (4 May 1905) 273.

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Unknown author, “Objects of the Order” in Souvenir Book, Supreme Tribe of Ben-Hur (undated), Marian Morrison Local History Collection, Crawfordsville District Public Library. Wallace, Lew, in David Mayer (ed.), Ben-Hur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Wallace, Lew, Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906).

CHAPTER 12

Jewish Women Writing Historical Novels Based on Rabbinic Sources Tal Ilan In 2012 two historical novels were published, one by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir publishing house in Israel and one by Penguin group in the USA. The one was written in Hebrew and the other in English. I doubt if one author knew of the other or shared her work and ideas with the other, but I identify in the two a literary and historical trend that unites in it the culmination of a long process within rabbinic studies which I would like to outline and characterize. The books are ‫ הפרדס של עקיבא‬by Yochi Brandes1 and Rav Hisda’s Daughter by Maggie Anton.2 The authors I am interested in come from completely different backgrounds: Brandes was born in a haredi home in Israel, daughter of a Hassidic admor and while holding on to her Jewish identity, has worked hard on releasing herself from the authoritative environment in which she grew up.3 First she shed her religious garb and turned secular and leftist in her views. Then she went to university. In order to do this she underwent a complex psychological and intellectual transformation, where much of the conventional wisdom about women and their role in society, which she received at home, would have had to be discarded. Anton, on the other hand, grew up in a secularsocialist house in California, and was drawn to her Jewish roots at a later stage in life.4 She too, would have had to undergo a transformation in her understanding of her identity and heritage. She has become a synagogue going woman, and a practicing Jew. Both women share, however, in what can be defined as nothing less than a scholarly revolution which, at the end of the

1  Yochi Brandes, Akiva’s Orchard (Or Yehudah: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2012). 2  Magie Anton, Rav Hisda’s Daughter, Book I: Apprentice: A Novel of Love, the Talmud, and Sorcery (New York: Plume,‎‪ 2012); and see also part 2: Enchantress: A Novel of Rav Hisda’s Daughter (New York:‎‪  Plume,‎‪  2014).‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ 3  I am quoting from her Hebrew Wikipedia site: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/‫יוכי_ברנדס‬. In English see http://www.ithl.org.il/page_15003. 4  See under http://maggieanton.com/.

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20th century opened up talmudic studies for women.5 Both books in which I am interested derive from this experience. Both authors have already tried their hand at writing historical novels previously. Brandes had written about the Dead Sea Sect (‫)לכבות את האהבה‬ and about the biblical period (‫)מלכים ג‬,6 and Maggie Anton is the author of a trilogy about Rashi’s daughters.7 We note that the issues they had previously concentrated on seem to circumvent the Talmud—Brandes wrote about the forerunners of rabbinic literature and Anton about its greatest commentator— as though they were both keeping away from the very heart of Judaism which they were studying. But they both finally arrived there, and at the same time—2012. Brandes and Anton have more in common: Not only are they women writing historical novels on the Talmud, they also both write in first person singular feminine. In other words, both speak in the name of a female heroine, who was supposed to have lived at the time about which they report, both women who are mentioned prominently in their sources—Brandes uses Rabbi Aqiva’s wife as her storyteller, and Anton, Bat Rav Hisda. In so doing, both women put into practice what feminist scholarship in all disciplines, and also in the study of rabbinic literature, preach—pull the woman out of the margin and put her in the centre. Anton and Brandes are thus products of the same historicalintellectual milieu. In the following lines I will describe this milieu in greater detail and show how their work fits into it. I will concentrate on three points: A. Rabbinic biography; B. Feminist rabbinic readings and C. Between the Land of Israel and Babylonia. 1

The Death of Rabbinic Biography

In 1936 in New York Louis Finkelstein published a biography of Rabbi Aqiva.8 This is a classic example of how rabbinic biography was written at the time. 5  The issue is being debated and studied extensively. For a very recent study see Ilan Fuchs, Jewish Women’s Torah Study: Orthodox Religious Education and Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 6  Yochi Brandes, Quench Love (Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 2001); Kings III (Or Yehudah: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2008). The latter has now been translated into English as Kings III [The Secret Book of Kings] (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016). 7  Maggie Anton, Rashi’s Daughters (A Trilogy—Book 1 Joheved 2007; Book 2 Miriam, 2007; Book 3 Rachel 2009; New York:‎‪ Plume). 8  Louis Finkelstein, Akiba: Scholar Saint and Martyr (New York: Covici Friede, 1936).

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I will demonstrate his methodology with one citation. About Aqiva’s youth Finkelstein writes: His father, Joseph, was a poor landless peasant, a labourer on the estate of a rich neighbour. It was with unconscious irony that these people were called am-haaretz, men of the soil, for their lack of landed possession was the fundamental characteristic of their existence. But the term had long lost its honorific connotations, and now meant nothing but “boor” and “ignoramus”; and in this sense it could be applied to Joseph with absolute precision. He knew nothing and cared nothing about the national literature of his people … probably he could neither read nor write. (pp. 18–19). It would be an error to infer from what had been said that Akiba’s childhood was unhappy. He knew hunger, he knew toil, he knew exposure … but the ancient Palestinian child had also his games, his fun and his holidays … It was impossible for him, however, to receive any book learning. Twenty years were to elapse before Joshua ben Gamla was to establish his first system of general rural education in Judea. At that time children could learn only from their parents, and Akiba could get from his father nothing more than the simple techniques of sheeptending. (p. 21) … The rabbinic maxim “marriage at eighteen” would have sounded like mockery to him. It was meant for the affluent … Condemned to the companionship of animals, and of peasants who were hardly more articulate, Akiba hated those to whom he should rightly have belonged … ‘When I was an am haartez,’ he reported years later, ‘I used to say: ‘would that I had a scholar in my hands and I should bite him like an ass’ (p. 22). For a scholar trained in rabbinic literature, it is clear where the information for this text derives. Rabbinic literature indeed relates that Rabbi Aqiva was the son of an anonymous Joseph (mMeaser Sheni 5:9); that he was a shepherd by profession (bKetubbot 62b); that he did not know the shape of a letter until he was forty (Bereshit Rabbah 101:10); and that he had indeed declared that when he was an am haaretz he hated the sages (bPesahim 49b). Even the idea that an egalitarian education system was put in place by Joshua ben Gamla is a well-known rabbinic tradition (bBava Batra 21a). However, all this information (aside from the name of his father) derives from late and tendentious sources and most of it from the Babylonian Talmud. In none of the earlier rabbinic sources is any such information provided, and the information in them sometimes actually contradicts these descriptions. For example, in the midrash from the Land of Israel Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, Rabbi Aqiva goes to study

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together with his son (Avot de Rabbi Nathan A:6; B:12). This means that he was married at a much younger age than Finkelstein would want us to think. The importance of this fact is that you cannot write a biography about someone who lived at the beginning of the first century with sources dating to the sixth century. No one writes rabbinic biographies like this today. Scholars like Jacob Neusner made sure of that. In his early academic career Neusner had tried his hand at a rabbinic biography, much in the same vain as Finkelstein’s Rabbi Akiva. In 1962 he published his A Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai9 where he too wrote similar texts like: “Since Yohanan died shortly after the destruction, possibly about the year eighty, and since he was credited with extraordinary longevity, one may well assume that he was born shortly after the end of the reign of Herod the Great …”10 The speculative nature of this statement is clear. It assumes that if a source claims that Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai (and Hillel and Rabbi Aqiva all) lived to the ripe old age of 120 (Bereshit Rabbah 101:10), but we cannot quite believe it, we assume it teaches us that he lived to a ripe old age. It further assumes that we can calculate from the stories of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai that he did not live to the end of the first century. From this we can calculate when he was born (say about the turn of the era) and what this may teach about the political atmosphere in which he grew up. But Neusner himself turned his back on his earlier work. In his later book, Development of a Legend: Studies on the Traditions Concerning Yohanan ben Zakkai11 in 1970 he wrote: No ‘life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai’ has come down to us from antiquity. We have no traces whatever of biography, no chronological sketch of the story of his life and deeds … we have only single stories … they are rather episodically set into several frameworks by editors for entirely different purposes (p. 1) … But one can hardly grant that things happened as the sources allege … No one seriously supposes that rabbinic sources supply … eyewitness accounts of great events … (p. 3). On texts that are found only in the Babylonian Talmud and not earlier Neusner remarked that “The first obvious conclusion is that rabbinic literature simply cannot be converted into historical narrative … The second is that the 9   Jacob Neusner, A Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden: Brill, 1962). 10   Ibid., 4. 11  Jacob Neusner, Development of a Legend: Studies on the Traditions Concerning Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden: Brill, 1970).

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historical question is not the only one of interest” (p. 300). And he was right, of course. Neusner’s conclusions were a field day for scholars of literature, foremost among them Jonah Frankel, who were arguing for a long time that historians should keep their hands away from rabbinic stories, which were literary constructions and pure fiction.12 Neusner, unlike these however, was himself a historian. Admitting to the truth of the literature scholars’ argument sealed the fate of rabbinic biography. No one writes such biographies these days. Yet, even though Neusner and his companions put an end to the genre of rabbinic biography, this does not detract from the fact that rabbinic literature contains a wealth of information on the life of rabbis like Rabbi Aqiva that would make very attractive pieces in a biographical jigsaw. These include the fact that he was ignorant till middle age (Bereshit Rabbah 101:10). The daughter of his rich employer spied his unique characteristics, fell in love with him, proposed and sent him to study. Her father disowned her and she lived in poverty all the time Aqiva studied, fending for herself. He came home to her after twenty four years the most accomplished of scholars, and recognized her contribution to his fame and success (bKetubbot 62b). Additionally, he was a great mystic, having survived the ultimate experience of entering the mythical Pardes (as in the title of Brandes’ book—see tHagigah 2:3 and parallels). He lived through the most tumultuous of times, and supported the messianic pretender Bar Kokhba (see primarily yTaanit 4:5, 68a). He even married (obviously again) the wife of his arch-enemy, the Roman governor, Tinius Rufus (bAvodah Zarah 20a). He died a martyr’s death at the hands of the Romans (e.g. bBerakhot 61b). If this is not the stuff for a biography, it is certainly the stuff of novels. Yochi Brandes understood this. She understood well that, in the absence of historians who tell his story and the stories of his contemporaries, who populate the study house at Yavneh (Rabban Gamaliel, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yishmael, Elisha ben Abuya, to name a few), we have no story about the real foundation of Judaism. This story she undertook to tell. And she put it in the mouth of a woman. 2

Feminist Reading of Rabbinic Literature

Feminist scholars have in the last thirty years scrutinized, to a great depth, rabbinic texts. I have had my lion’s share of this enterprise. We have drawn scholars 12  E.g. Jonah Fraenkel, “Hermeneutic Problems in the Study of the Aggadic Narrative”, Tarbiz 47 (1978) 139–172 (Hebrew).

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of rabbinic literature’s attention to the way women are presented and judged in rabbinic literature, usually to the detriment of the rabbis. I have, however, argued that we cannot ignore the scholarly achievements of our predecessors, and so, in my book Mine and Yours are Hers,13 which I devoted to the study of the historical wife of Rabbi Aqiva, I concluded, much like Neusner, that there is very little historical data about her that we can trust. In fact, I argued, there are only two such details: The first piece of information was adduced with the help of a criterion which examined the part played by the woman in the story—was it essential to the plot? Could the story have been told without it? Could it have been told equally of a man? If it could have been, but was not, her part in the story was probably real. One clear element in all versions of the stories about Rabbi Aqiva’s wife stands out, namely, could Rabbi Aqiva have achieved greatness without the help of his wife? The answer to this question is, without doubt, yes. Both versions of Avot de-Rabbi Nathan indeed tell such a story (Avot de-Rabbi Nathan A:6; B:12). And yet, after the story­tellers have finished describing Aqiva’s independent rise to prominence, they turn around and credit the wife for it (and see also bKetubbot 62b-63a; bNazir 50a; yShabbat 6:1, 7d). Obvi­ously the role of Aqiva’s wife in his rise to greatness was too well known to the audience to be totally down-played. Therefore, I concluded that this persistent element in three different stories reflects the historical fact that Aqiva’s fame, un­like that of his col­leagues, was in fact achieved with the help of his wife. Exactly what she did, how she helped him, what support she rendered him, we do not know. But whatever it was, it must have been substantial if it left such an imprint on the minds of storytellers. Another detail also persists in all three traditions, though it is not integral to the story—the mention of the gold headdress Aqiva made for his wife. This item, designated “City of Gold” in the Palestinian Talmud, “Jerusalem of Gold” in the Babylonian Talmud and simply “Golden Crown” in Avot de-Rabbi Nathan B, ap­parently captured the imagination of gossips and ultimately of story­tellers.… and it also contradicts the poverty theme popular in the Aqiva stories. This indi­cates, I think, that it is the second pillar on which the Rabbi Aqiva-and-Wife cor­pus developed. It seems to echo something that

13  Tal Ilan, Mine and Yours are Hers: Retrieving Women’s History from Rabbinic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1997) 295–296.

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really happened. Rabbi Aqiva really did give his wife a magnificent golden ti­ ara. Everybody knew and remem­bered it. In light of these very limited conclusions, I allowed myself to wonder what could be “the full significance of one woman who helped her husband be­come a great sage and was rewarded with an impressive headdress.” Yochi Brandes and Maggie Anton attempt to answer this sort of question. Here are two examples of how they do this, in very similar ways. One is perhaps trivial but the other has far reaching consequences. I start with the question of named or unnamed women. Yochi Brandes names her heroine—the ‘I voice’ in her book—Rachel. She is not alone in this. Most people who know something of Rabbi Aqiva assume this. Dalia Rabikovich, in her popular song on Rabbi Aqiva’s love affair, names her thus.14 Finkelstein, mentioned above, does so, writing: “From this pit of perdition Akiba was fortunately saved by the love of the woman, Rachel, who became his wife.”15 Even the perhaps most influential living talmudist, Daniel Boyarin, does so. In his most feminist book on woman and rabbinic literature, Carnal Israel, he wrote: “The entire story of the romance of Rabbi Akiva and Rachel is generated by one root metaphor: Akiva as shepherd and Rachel as ewe … There is another important biblical intertext here, the story of Jacob and his marriages … and there also the name of the wife is Rachel. Moreover, that shepherd’s name, Ya‘qov, is an almost perfect anagram of our hero’s name.”16 But the truth is that we have no evidence at all that this was the woman’s name, as I showed back in 1997: Although the stories of Rabbi Aqiva’s wife are recorded six times in four different documents, in only one case, Avot de-Rabbi Nathan A:6, which is probably the latest document, is the woman given a name. Her name is Rachel. Is this a historical name? Was this indeed the name of Rabbi Aqiva’s wife? On the face of it, it seems convincing … However, a closer look leads to a different conclusion. One of the two versions of the RabbiAqiva-and-wife tradition in the Babylonian Talmud has been supplied with an epilogue: “Rabbi Aqiva’s daughter did the same (as her mother) for Ben Azzai (i.e. waited for him while he studied). This is what is meant by the expression: the sheep follows the sheep (‫)רחילא בתר רחילא אזלא‬, 14   www.shironet.mako.co.il/artist?type=lyrics&lang=1&prfid=302&wrkid=2790:  ‫"ראתה‬ "‫ ראתה אותו רחל שהוא מעולה וצנוע‬/ ‫אותו רחל בתו של כלבא שבוע‬ 15  Finkelstein (1936) 22. 16  Daniel Boyarin, Carnal lsrael: Reading Sex in Rabbinic Culture (Berkeley: Berkley University Press, 1993) 151–154.

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the deeds of the daughter imitate the deeds of the mother” (B. Ketubbot 63a). This Aramaic expression, which does not mention any actual name, likens Rabbi Aqiva’s wife to a sheep. The word sheep in Aramaic (‫)רחילא‬ stems from the same root as the name Rachel (‫)רחל‬. My guess is that this Aramaic saying was understood by the editor of Avot de-Rabbi Nathan A, who … was apparently acquainted with the Babylonian Talmud, to hint at the name of the woman.17 In other words, like most women in rabbinic literature, Rabbi Aqiva’s wife is nameless. The Jerusalem Talmud has no name for her. The Babylonian Talmud has no name for her. Even Avot de-Rabbi Nathan B has no name for her. And the name Avot de-Rabbi Nathan A gives her is a pun on a well-known Babylonian saying. A feminist project is to bring these nameless women out of anonymity. Although in this case Avot de-Rabbi Nathan A has already done this, the poet Dalia Rabikovich and the novelist Yochi Brandes are much more justified in using this name to bolster their literary creation than are Louis Finkelstein or Daniel Boyarin, who should have shown more circumspection in opting for this name. Maggie Anton, here has done more than Brandes. The heroine of her book is also nameless. Bat Rav Hisda appears more than a dozen times in the Babylonian Talmud,18 making her the most prominent female character in the entire composition. By choosing to write about her, Anton has rightly identified in her a person who is located at the very heart of the Babylonian amoraic period. She was the daughter of an important scholar of the rabbinical school in Sura (Rav Hisda—see first and foremost bEruvin 65a but also bHullin 44b), and married in succession two scholars—Rami bar Hama and Rava (bBava Batra 12b; bBerakhot 44a). The second of the two was certainly one of the most prominent and memorable of the Babylonian amoraim. Because everything told about her is anecdotal and relatively trivial (she ran a kosher home properly—bHullin 44b; bHagigah 5a, she used charms to protect her husband in the privy—bBerakhot 62a, she became physically ill when her husband was away from home—bShabbat 129a), Anton had great freedom in crafting her story. This began with naming her heroine. She could call her whatever she wanted. Yet it is a credit to the author’s commitment to history that she chose for her the name Hisdadukh. How did she decide on such a weird name? 17  Ilan (1997) 289–290. 18  1. bBer 44a; 2. Ibid., 56a; 3. Ibid., 62a; 4. bShabbat 129a; 5. Ibid., 140b; 6. bEruvin 65a; 7. Hagigah 5a; 8. bYevamot 34b; 9. bKetubbot 39b; 10. Ibid., 65a; 11. Ibid., 85a; 12. bQiddushin 81b-82a; 13. bBava Batra 12b; 14. b; Hullin 44b.

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Would a biblical name like Sarah not have been just as good? Anton rightly thought otherwise. Her research had led her to look into the second Jewish written source from Babylonia next to the Talmud—incantation bowls. These were protective Jewish amulets buried under the houses of the clients, and the clients were women as well as men, and all were called after their mothers, as is common in magic lore.19 This allowed Anton to examine a huge repository of female names used by Jewish women in Babylonia, and she discerned that, not only were biblical names very rare, but also that the majority of names were Persian and that many of them had the element dukh (i.e. daughter) in them: daughter of the Good God (Hormizdukh), daughter of the moon (Mihrdukh) and so on and so forth.20 She thus decided that if the woman is called Bat Rav Hisda in the Talmud, her name may well have been Hisdadukh. I argue that using this name for Bat Rav Hisda is not less historical than using Rachel for Rabbi Aqiva’s wife, and Anton’s decision in its favor is less midrashic and more historical than Avot de-Rabbi Nathan A’s decision in favor of Rachel. I am pointing these aspects out in order to emphasize what my major argument in this paper is, namely that historical novels have rightly replaced older rabbinic biographies, and that their use of sources in their reconstruction of this imagined history is not more, and sometimes less fanciful than the former. My second example, about how Brandes and Anton remove the woman from the margins and place her in the centre, derives from a complex reading of their two women heroines’ actions and an understanding of the historical role of women in rabbinic society. Both Anton and Brandes make the 19  Aside from the by-now classical collection of James A. Montgomery, Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur (Philadelphia: University Museum, 1913) who actually excavated many such bowls in Nippur, see also Charles D. Isbell, Corpus of the Aramaic Incantation Bowls (Atlanta: SBL & Scholars Press, 1975); Joseph Naveh, and Shaul Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1987); Naveh and Shaked, Magic Spells and Formulae: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993); Judah B. Segal, Catalogue of the Aramaic and Mandaic Incantation Bowls in the British Museum (London: British Museum Press, 2000); Dan Levene, A Corpus of Magic Bowls: Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity (London: Paul Kegan, 2003); Christa Müller-Kessler, Die Zauberschalentexte in der Hilprecht-Sammlung, Jena und weitere Nippur-Texte anderer Sammlungen (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 2005); Shaul Shaked, James N. Ford, and Siam Bhayro, Aramaic Bowl Spells: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls I (Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection) (Leiden: Brill, 2013). These are only collections, many other individual bowls, too many to mention, have also been published over the years. 20  For all these names together see now Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity Part IV: The Eastern Diaspora 330 BCE–650 CE (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011) 207–256.

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woman in question literate and knowledgeable in matters of Jewish law. This is, of course, not at all self-evident and has to be explained. Anton bases her argument on the idea that Hisdadukh grew up in a scholar’s household. Her father had seven sons (all known from elsewhere in the Babylonian Talmud21) and he taught students at home. Hisdaduk more or less picked her education up from just being there. Then Anton argues that an alternative knowledge system to the talmudic one—magic—was wholly in the hands of women who wrote amulets and magic bowls. Her argument for this is the mention of a head woman witch in the Babylonian Talmud.22 In order for them to be able to engage in such a profession, of course, women needed to be able to write, practice calligraphy and be in possession of much alternative knowledge. Yet Anton’s Hisdadukh has something else. She is also a prophet. Anton writes (in first person of course, in the name of Hidadukh): Father put his arm around my shoulder and asked me, ‘Which of these do you want for a husband’? To this day I do not know if I was a prophet, as Rava believes … for when I looked up at father the words that came out of my mouth were ‘both of them’ … and that is what came to pass.23 A similar vision is presented by Yochi Brandes. She too has to explain how her heroine came to possess knowledge of reading and writing, so much so that she could teach her illiterate future husband. She explains that, being the only child of her rich father, a lover of Torah and a supporter of Torah scholars, he taught her Torah, even though he feared what one rabbi—Rabbi Eliezer—who explicitly condemned the teaching of Torah to women (mSotah 3:4), would say. In any case, Rachel’s authority too, in the end, derives, so Brandes, from her prophetic capabilities. The bride of Rabban Shimeon ben Gamaliel asks Rachel to accompany her in her wedding, which is celebrated in Beitar before the Bar Kokhba revolt is crashed. When explaining why she is asking Rachel to accompany her, the bride says (or rather Brandes writes and I translate): I dreamt that a prophetess will accompany me in my bridal procession, she smiles. I am not a prophetess, [I say. She answers:] Only a prophet could observe an ignorant shepherd, who cannot recognize the shape of 21  1. Nahman—e.g. bBerakhot 61a; 2. Mar Qeshisha—e.g. bPesahim 107a; 3. Mar Yenuqa—e.g. bPesahim 107a; 4. Rabin—e.g. bGittin 5b; 5. Tahlifa—e.g. bGittin 31b; 6. Pinhas—e.g. bQiddushin 32b; 7. Hanan—e.g. bAvodah Zarah 11b. 22   bPesahim 110a. 23  Anton (2012) xxvi.

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a letter and know he will become Rabbi Aqiva … Miriam halts before she enters the Huppa … ‘A bridal prayer is answered immediately,’ she says in innocent belief … ‘please tell me what prayer to utter.’ I bring my lips close to her ear and whisper: ‘Pray that I am not a prophetess.’24 It is obvious, according to Brandes, why this is Rachel’s prayer for Miriam. She already sees in her prophetic mind the tragic end of the revolt that all are now celebrating. This, of course, does indeed make her, at least in the eyes of Brandes, a prophetess. I think it remarkable that both authors define their heroines as prophetesses, something that the talmudim do for neither, and I believe this understanding derives from a well-known fact that prophecy was an acceptable role for women already in the Bible.25 Because they also denied women any position within their honours system, rabbis could only recognize women as authoritative when blessed with the power of prophecy invested in them by God. Our authors, of course, want their heroines to be recognized by the rabbinic system even more than the meagre position granted to them in rabbinic literature. Perhaps it is, therefore of some interest to note the sort of prophecy the two women are granted and the difference between them. While Hisdadukh’s prophecy is personal and touches on her own life and that of her immediate family, Rachel’s prophecy is of national significance, and touches on the very fate of the people of Israel before, during and after the Bar Kokhba revolt. And this is again indicative of the third aspect I wish to address, namely the difference between a heroine in the Land of Israel and a heroine in the Diaspora; the difference between an author in Israel and an author in the Diaspora; the difference between sources from Eretz Israel and sources from Babylonia. 3

Babylonia and the Land of Israel

The return to Zion and the foundation of the mada’ei hayahadut at the Hebrew University had much to do with the themes on which Jewish studies in general and of rabbinic literature in particular focused. For hundreds of year it was the Babylonian Talmud that was the topic of study in Jewish yeshivot and study houses the world over. But Zionism shifted the focus within rabbinic literature from the Babylonian Talmud, the Talmud of the Diaspora, to rabbinic 24  Brandes (2012) 338–339. 25  See Tal Ilan, “Huldah, the Deuteronomic Prophetess of the Book of Kings”, Lectio Difficilior 11/1 (2010) http://www.lectio.unibe.ch/10_1/ilan.html.

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literature produced in Eretz Israel: The Mishnah, the Tosefta, various early and late midrashim and the Jewel in the Crown—the Talmud Yerushalmi. The greatest scholars of rabbinic literature have in the 20th century been scholars of the Torah of Eretz Israel. First among them was Shaul Lieberman. Even though his dreams for an appointment at the Talmud Department of the Hebrew University had been dashed, and so he worked in the Jewish Theological Seminary in the diaspora of New York, and even though in his most personal of article he identified strongly with Babylonian rabbis who migrated to Palestine and received a cold welcome, some of them choosing to then go home to Babylonia,26 his own work was devoted first and foremost to the Tosefta,27 but also to the Yerushalmi,28 both major Palestinian works. The Yerushalmi has since received considerable attention and treatment in Israel by Yaacov Sussman.29 Others in the Talmud and neighboring Departments in Jerusalem followed suit, all concentrating on the Torah of the tannaim and the amoraim of the Land of Israel.30 Even historians praised it as being by far superior as a historical source than the Babylonian Talmud.31 26  Saul Lieberman, “ ‘ That is how it was and that is how it shall be’: The Jews of Eretz Israel and World Jewry during Mishnah and Talmud Times”, Cathedra 17 (1980) 3–10 (Hebrew), and see especially yBerakhot 2:8, 5c. 27  See his magnum opus: Tosefta kifshuta (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1955– 1988) In Hebrew. 28   Ha-Yerushalmi kifshuto (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1935). 29  Yaacov Sussmann, Talmud Yerushalmi according to Ms. Or. 4720 (Scal. 3) of the Leiden University Library with Restorations and Corrections (Jerusalem: Academy of Hebrerw Language 2001—in Hebrew). 30  Here is a sample: on tannaitic midrashim see Menahem I. Kahanah, Sifre Zuta on Deuteronomy: Citations from a New Tannaitic Midrash (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2002— in Hebrew); The Genizah Fragments of the Halakhic Midrashim (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2005—in Hebrew); Sifre on Numbers: An Annotated Edition (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2011–15—in Hebrew). On Avot de-Rabbi Nathan see Menahem Kister, Studies in Avot de Rabbi Nathan: Text, Redaction and Interpretation (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi 1998—in Hebrew); on Megillat Ta‘anit see Vered Noam, Megillat Ta‘anit: Versions, Interpretation, History (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi 2003—in Hebrew); on Seder Olam Rabbah see Chaim Milikowsky, Seder Olam: Critical Edition, Commentary and Introduction (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi 2013—in Hebrew); on Lamentations Rabbah see Galit Hasan-Rokem, The Web of Life—Folklore in Rabbinic Literature: The Palestinian Aggadic Midrash Eikha Rabba (Tel Aviv: Am Oved 1996—in Hebrew); on Palestinian Targum see Avigdor Shinan, The Biblical Story as Reflected in its Aramaic Translations (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993; The Embroidered Trgum: The Aggadah in Targum PseudoJonathan of the Pentateuch (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 1992—in Hebrew). 31  See for example, Shmuel Safrai, “Tales of the Sages in the Palestinian Tradition and the Babylonian Talmud”, Scripta Hierosolymitana, 22 (1971) 209–232; Joshua Efron, Studies on

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Shaul Lieberman argued that rabbinic literature of the Land of Israel was produced within a pronounced Greco-Roman culture, and to properly understand it, one must study Greek and Latin. He himself was proficient in both.32 It has since become almost an obligation to study at least Greek in order to do Talmud.33 Studying the Babylonian Talmud on an academic basis had to remain the business of the Diaspora. The major strides in its study were made in the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, in studies spearheaded by David Weiss-Halivni34 and his students.35 The last decade has seen new major the Hasmonean Period (Leiden: Brill 1987) 143–218. And see also the historical interpretation of the Mishnah undertaken by the Safrai family Mishnat Eretz Israel with Historical and Sociological Commentary (Jerusalem: E.M. Liphshitz Publishing House 2008–2013 to date—in Hebrew). 32  See Saul Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Life and Manners of Jewish Palestine in the II–IV Centuries C.E. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary 1942); Hellenism in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Literary Transmission, Beliefs and Manners of Palestine in the I Century B.C.E.–IV Century CE (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1950). 33  See e.g. Daniel Sperber, Greek in Talmudic Palestine (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2012); Giusepe Veltri, Magie und Halakha: Ansätze zu einem empirischen Wissenschaftsbegriff im spätantiken und frühmittelalterlichen Judentum (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997); Louis H. Feldman, “How Much Hellenism in Jewish Palestine?” Hebrew Union College Annual 57 (1986) 83–111; Catherine Hezser, “The Codification of Legal Knowledge in Late Antiquity: The Talmud Yerushalmi and Roman Law Codes” in Peter Schäfer (ed.), The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, Vol. I (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998) 581–641; Philip Alexander, “Quid Athenis et Hierosolymis?: Rabbinic Midrasch and Hermeneutics in the Graeco-Roman World”, in Philip R. Davies and Richard T. White (eds.),  A Tribute to Geza Vermes: Essays on Jewish and Christian Literature and History (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1990) 101–124; David Brodsky, “From Disagreement to Talmudic Discourse: Progymnasmata and the Evolution of a Rabbinic Genre”, in Ronit Nikolsky and Tal Ilan (eds.), Rabbinic Traditions between Palestine and Babylonia (Leiden: Brill, 2014) 173–231. 34  David Halivni, Sources and Traditions: A Source Critical Commentary [on the Babylonian Talmud] (Tel Aviv: Dvir and Jerusalem: Magnes 1969–2012 to date) and see also his The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud (New York: Oxford University Press 1913). 35  Foremost among them Shamma Friedman, see his Talmud Arukh: BT Bava Mezi‘a VI (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1990–1996—in Hebrew) and his Talmudic Studies: Investigating the Sugya, Variant Readings and Aggada (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2010—in Hebrew). See also Judith Hauptman, Development of the Talmudic Sugya: Relationship between Tannaitic and Amoraic Sources (Lanham, MD.:‎‪  University Press of America,‎‪ 1988); Richard L. Kalmin, The Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud: Amoraic or Saboraic? (Cincinnati:‎‪  Hebrew Union College Press,‎‪  1989); Sages, Stories, Authors, and Editors in Rabbinic Babylonia (Atlanta, Ga.:‎‪ Scholars Press,‎‪ 1994); and now

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developments in the field—the recognition that the Babylonian Talmud should be studied within its cultural environment. To that end Yaakov Elman (of Yeshiveh University New York) first studied Pahlavi, that is Middle Persian, the language employed in the Sasanian court under whose rule the Jews of Babylonia lived, and then sent the message of the importance of this study.36 Many are following suit and studying Pahlavi.37 Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine (New York:‎‪  Oxford University Press,‎‪  2006) and see next note; Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore, MD.:‎‪ Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 36  Yaakov Elman, “Acculturation to Elite Persian Norms and Modes of Thought in the Babylonian Jewish Community of Late Antiquity”, in Yaakov Elman, Ephraim B. Halivni and Zvi Arie Steinfeld (eds.), Neti’ot Le-David: Jubilee Volume for David Weiss Halivni (Jerusalem: Orhot, 2004) 310–56; “The Other in the Mirror: Iranians and Jews View One Another: Questions of Identity, Conversion and Exogamy in the Fifth-Century Iranian Empire”, Bulletin of the Asia Institute, 19 (2005) 15–25; “Who are the Kings of East and West in Ber 7a?: Roman Religion, Syrian Gods and Zoroastrianism in the Babylonian Talmud”, in Shaye J. D. Cohen and Seth Schwartz (eds.), Studies in Josephus and the Varieties of Ancient Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2007) 43–80; “Middle Persian Culture and Babylonian Sages: Accommodation and Resistance in the Shaping of Rabbinic Legal Tradition”, in Charlotte E. Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 165–97; “Toward an Intellectual History of Sasanian Law: An Intergenerational Dispute in ‘Herbedestan’ 9 and its Rabbinic and Roman Parallels”, in Carol Bakhos and M. Rahim Shayegan (eds.), The Talmud in its Iranian Context (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010) 21–57. 37  As a most typical representative see Shai Secunda, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in its Iranian Context (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2014); but see also Geoffrey Herman, A Prince without a Kingdom: The Exilarch in the Sasanian Era (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012); “Ahasuerus, the former Stable-Master of Belshazzar, and the Wicked Alexander of Macedon: Two Parallels between the Babylonian Talmud and Persian Sources”, Association of Jewish Studies Review, 29 (2005) 283–297; Reuven Kiperwasser, “ ‘Three partners in a person’: The Genesis and Development of Embryological Theory in Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism”, Lectio Difficilior, 9/2 (2009) http://www.lectio.unibe .ch/09_2/kiperwasser.html; “The Misfortunes and Adventures of Elihoreph and Ahiah in the Land of Israel and in Babylonia: The Metamorphosis of a Narrative Tradition and Ways of Acculturation”, in Ronit Nikolsky and Tal Ilan (eds.), Rabbinic Traditions between Palestine and Babylonia”, (Leiden: Brill, 2014) 232–249; with Dan Shapira, “IranoTalmudica I: The Three-Legged Ass and ‘Ridyā’ in B. Ta’anith: Some Observations about Mythic Hydrology in the Babylonian Talmud and in Ancient Iran”, Association of Jewish Studies Review, 32 (2008) 101–116; “Irano-Talmudica II: Leviathan, Behemoth and the “Domestication” of Iranian Mythological Creatures in Eschatological Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud”, in Shai Secunda and Steven Fine (eds.), Shoshannat Yaaqov: Jewish and Iranian Studies in Honor of Yaakov Elman (Leiden: Brill, 2012) 203–235; Yishai Kiel, “Redesigning TZITZIT in the Babylonian Talmud in Light of Literary Depictions of

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In light of the picture I present, it should come as no surprise that Yochi Brandes, the Israeli-born author, who has studied rabbinic literature in Israel, has chosen to write her historical novel about the rabbis of the Land of Israel, while Maggie Anton, a Jew who lives in California, and who has studied her Talmud there, has concentrated on the Babylonian Talmud. This dichotomy is not just a superficial difference in focus, but runs deep into the sort of historical novel the two have written. In Yochi Brandes’ book the political reality is ever present. Judaism is in deep conflict with its Christian offshoot and is in constant strife with the Roman authorities. The question of the very fate of Jews in the country is debated all the time. Rabbi Aqiva heads a national movement, and dies terribly as a consequence of it. Yochi Brandes is forever aware that she is writing about a major moment in Jewish history which had decided the fate of the Jews one way and not the other. Maggie Anton’s book is much more relaxed. Politics is the domain of others in it. The Jews in Babylonia live in peace and prosperity under the benevolent Sasanian overlords. They live in a favorable atmosphere to cultivate their own culture. Hisdadukh’s love stories and tragedies are her very own. Her actions are personal. They have no national significance. In fact, Babylonia is the perfect Diaspora. The Land of Israel is there as a secure mother land one can depend on, but need not live in. To describe the Diaspora in Jewish history as a relaxed, friendly, encouraging environment in which Jews could thrive better than in their homeland is certainly to ignore the worst moments in Jewish history, including of course the Holocaust itself, but one cannot blame Anton for choosing to portray Jewish Babylonia in this light. The foremost Talmudic scholar of rabbinic literature, Daniel Boyarin is today engaged in such a project.38 Here is a description I copied from the internet of a lecture he gave at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013:39 “In place of the lachrymose notion of diaspora as a condition of suffering and longing for an alleged homeland, Daniel Boyarin contends that the Babylonian Talmud figures Babylonia as a second homeland for the Jews … He will show … that as it travels through time and space, the Talmud produces ever new diasporic formations.” I have myself heard him on numerous occasions the Zoroastrian KUSTIG”, in ibid., 185–202; Maria Macuch, “Allusions to Sasanian Law in the Babylonian Talmud”, in Carol Bakhos and M. Rahim Shayegan (eds.), The Talmud in its Iranian Context (Tübingen Mohr Siebeck, 2010) 100–111. 38  See his very latest book: Daniel Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 39  The text is no longer online.

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expound his theory on the peaceful and fruitful diasporic conditions that produced and disseminated the Babylonian Talmud. The political message of this lecture is unmistakable: The Jews do not need a homeland. Every time they tried to have one it was a disaster. The Diaspora is the true home of the Jews and they can easily live within the Babylonian Talmud. In a way, Yochi Brandes’ book confirms Boyarin’s second contention, namely that attempts to build a Jewish state have ended in disaster, and in her talks she has signaled that one should understands her book as a warning for Israel today.40 But I think only Jews who live in North America today could subscribe to Boyarin’s first contention that the Diaspora is not a “condition of suffering and longing for an alleged homeland”; certainly not Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe in the 1930s, and not even Jews in Russia today. But both Daniel Boyarin and Maggie Anton live in the 21 century in California. Anton’s book nicely demonstrates, using the genre of the historical novel, the sort of argument Boyrin puts forward in his lectures. We have to contend, I think, that in the end all authors write about themselves. Finally I would like to point out that the two books I have chosen to portray in this paper are not isolated phenomena, representing nothing but themselves. They are even now a part of a growing literary trend that cannot be ignored. Note for example the book by the Israeli Emuna Elon, in Hebrew—‫במופלא‬ ‫—ממני‬that also appeared in print in 2012, which discusses the fate of the rabbis from the Land of Israel, Resh Laqish and Rabbi Yohanan41 versus the book— Samuel’s Daughter—from 2009 written in English by Ann Brener—about the daughter of the great Babylonian sage.42 And there is the book Komish bath Machlafta, by the Israeli woman Dorit Kedar,43 also about a woman from the talmudic period, and even though it is mostly about incantation bowls, which are, as I showed above, typical Babylonian objects, she being Israeli, situates her heroine and her exploits in the Land of Israel.44 We have not, I think, seen the last of historical novels to be written by women on talmudic women, and 40  See www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbzhOrttMjk (Hebrew). 41  Emuna Elon, Beyond my Sight (Or Yhudah: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2012—in Hebrew). 42  Ann Brener, Samuel’s Daughter: A Love Story from Third-Century Parthia (private publication 2009). 43  Dorit Kedar, Komish bath Machlafta: A Fake Biography of a Real Woman (private publication, 2013—in Hebrew). 44  And also on the Israeli film about the female talmudic sage Beruriah, produced and directed by Avraham Kushnir in 2008, see my commentary in Tal Ilan, “The New Israeli Film Beruriah: Between Rashi and Talmud, between Antiquity and Modernity, between Feminism and Religion”, in Almut-Barbara Renger and Jon Solomon (eds.), Ancient Worlds in Film and Television (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2013) 309–324.

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the split between the languages (Hebrew and English) and between their locations (Babylonia and the Land of Israel) will probably continue to be with us. 4 Summary In this paper I have drawn attention to a new phenomenon—learned Jewish women writing historical novels based on rabbinic literature. I have tied this phenomenon with two intersecting trends one can follow—one social and one academic. The social trend is the ever growing movement of Jewish women studying Talmud, internalizing its contents and recognizing its totalizing effect on their lives. Becoming a historical novelist, and writing about the hero/ines of this literature is one way of making sense of this experience. The academic trend is the ever more sceptical approach adopted by rabbinic scholars to the historical value of information embedded in rabbinic literature. The learnedtalmudist women writing historical novels fill the void created by the withdrawal of the historians from this realm. Bibliography Alexander, Philip, “Quid Athenis et Hierosolymis?: Rabbinic Midrash and Hermeneu­ tics in the Graeco-Roman World”, in Philip R. Davies and Richard T. White (eds.), A Tribute to Geza Vermes: Essays on Jewish and Christian Literature and History (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1990) 101–124. Anton, Maggie, Rashi’s Daughters (A Trilogy—Book 1 Joheved 2007; Book 2 Miriam, 2007; Book 3 Rachel 2009; New York:‎‪ Plume). Anton, Maggie, Rav Hisda’s Daughter, Book I: Apprentice: A Novel of Love, the Talmud, and Sorcery (New York: Plume,‎‪ 2012). Anton, Maggie, Enchantress: A Novel of Rav Hisda’s Daughter (New York:‎‪ Plume,‎‪  2014). Boyarin, Daniel, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (Phila­ delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Boyarin, Daniel, Carnal lsrael: Reading Sex in Rabbinic Culture (Berkeley: Berkley University Press, 1993) 151–154. Brandes, Yochi, Akiva’s Orchard (Or Yehudah: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2012). Brandes, Yochi, Quench Love (Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 2001). Brandes, Yochi, Kings III (Or Yehudah: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2008). (Kings III [The Secret Book of Kings]) (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016). Brener, Ann, Samuel’s Daughter: A Love Story from Third-Century Parthia (private publication, 2009).

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Brodsky, David, “From Disagreement to Talmudic Discourse: Progymnasmata and the Evolution of a Rabbinic Genre”, in Ronit Nikolsky and Tal Ilan (eds.), Rabbinic Traditions between Palestine and Babylonia (Leiden: Brill, 2014) 173–231. Efron, Joshua, Studies on the Hasmonean Period (Leiden: Brill, 1987) 143–218. Elman, Yaakov, “Acculturation to Elite Persian Norms and Modes of Thought in the Babylonian Jewish Community of Late Antiquity”, in Yaakov Elman, Ephraim B. Halivni and Zvi Arie Steinfeld (eds.), Neti’ot Le-David: Jubilee Volume for David Weiss Halivni (Jerusalem: Orhot, 2004) 310–56. Elman, Yaakov, “Middle Persian Culture and Babylonian Sages: Accommodation and Resistance in the Shaping of Rabbinic Legal Tradition”, in Charlotte E. Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 165–97. Elman, Yaakov, “The Other in the Mirror: Iranians and Jews View One Another: Questions of Identity, Conversion and Exogamy in the Fifth-Century Iranian Empire”, Bulletin of the Asia Institute, 19 (2005) 15–25. Elman, Yaakov, “Toward an Intellectual History of Sasanian Law: An Intergenerational Dispute in ‘Herbedestan’ 9 and its Rabbinic and Roman Parallels”, in Carol Bakhos and M. Rahim Shayegan (eds.), The Talmud in its Iranian Context (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010) 21–57. Elman, Yaakov, “Who are the Kings of East and West in Ber 7a?: Roman Religion, Syrian Gods and Zoroastrianism in the Babylonian Talmud”, in Shaye J.D. Cohen and Seth Schwartz (eds.), Studies in Josephus and the Varieties of Ancient Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2007) 43–80. Elon, Emuna, Beyond my Sight (Or Yehudah: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2012) (Hebrew). Feldman, Louis H., “How Much Hellenism in Jewish Palestine?” Hebrew Union College Annual 57 (1986) 83–111. Finkelstein, Louis, Akiba: Scholar Saint and Martyr (New York: Covici Friede, 1936). Fraenkel, Jonah, “Hermeneutic Problems in the Study of the Aggadic Narrative”, Tarbiz 47 (1978) 139–172 (Hebrew). Friedman, Shamma, Talmud Arukh: BT Bava Mezi‘a VI (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1990–1996) (Hebrew). Friedman, Shamma, Talmudic Studies: Investigating the Sugya, Variant Readings and Aggada (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2010) (Hebrew). Fuchs, Ilan, Jewish Women’s Torah Study: Orthodox Religious Education and Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). Halivni, David, Sources and Traditions: A Source Critical Commentary [on the Babylonian Talmud] (Tel Aviv: Dvir and Jerusalem: Magnes, 1969–2012 to date). Halivni, David, The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud (New York: Oxford University Press, 1913).

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Hasan-Rokem, Galit, The Web of Life—Folklore in Rabbinic Literature: The Palestinian Aggadic Midrash Eikha Rabba (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1996) (Hebrew). Hauptman, Judith, Development of the Talmudic Sugya: Relationship between Tannaitic and Amoraic Sources (Lanham, MD.:‎‪ University Press of America,‎‪ 1988)‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬. Herman, Geoffrey, “Ahasuerus, the former Stable-Master of Belshazzar, and the Wicked Alexander of Macedon: Two Parallels between the Babylonian Talmud and Persian Sources”, Association of Jewish Studies Review 29 (2005) 283–297. Herman, Geoffrey, A Prince without a Kingdom: The Exilarch in the Sasanian Era (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012). Hezser, Catherine, “The Codification of Legal Knowledge in Late Antiquity: The Talmud Yerushalmi and Roman Law Codes” in Peter Schäfer (ed.), The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture Vol. I (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998) 581–641. Ilan, Tal, “Huldah, the Deuteronomic Prophetess of the Book of Kings”, Lectio Diffi­ cilior 11/1 (2010) http://www.lectio.unibe.ch/10_1/ilan.html (accessed 4 November 2016). Ilan, Tal, “The New Israeli Film Beruriah: Between Rashi and Talmud, between Antiquity and Modernity, between Feminism and Religion”, in Almut-Barbara Renger and Jon Solomon (eds.), Ancient World in Film and Television (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2013) 309–324. Ilan, Tal, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity Part IV: The Eastern Diaspora 330 BCE–650 CE (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011) 207–256. Ilan, Tal, Mine and Yours are Hers: Retrieving Women’s History from Rabbinic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1997) 295–296. Isbell, Charles D., Corpus of the Aramaic Incantation Bowls (Atlanta: SBL & Scholars Press, 1975). Kahanah, Menahem I., Sifre on Numbers: An Annotated Edition (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2011–15) (Hebrew). Kahanah, Menahem I., Sifre Zuta on Deuteronomy: Citations from a New Tannaitic Midrash (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2002) (Hebrew). Kahanah, Menahem I., The Genizah Fragments of the Halakhic Midrashim (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2005) (Hebrew). Kalmin, Richard L., Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine (New York:‎‪ Oxford University Press,‎‪ 2006)‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬. Kalmin, Richard L., Sages, Stories, Authors, and Editors in Rabbinic Babylonia (Atlanta, GA.:‎‪ Scholars Press,‎‪ 1994). ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ Kalmin, Richard L., The Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud: Amoraic or Saboraic? (Cincinnati:‎‪ Hebrew Union College Press,‎‪ 1989)‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬.‬ Kedar, Dorit, Komish bath Machlafta: A Fake Biography of a Real Woman (private publication, 2013) (Hebrew).

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Kiel, Yishai, “Redesigning TZITZIT in the Babylonian Talmud in Light of Literary Depictions of the Zoroastrian KUSTIG”, in Shai Secunda and Steven Fine (eds.), Shoshannat Yaaqov: Jewish and Iranian Studies in Honor of Yaakov Elman (Leiden: Brill, 2012) 185–202. Kiperwasser, Reuven, “ ‘Three partners in a person’: The Genesis and Development of Embryological Theory in Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism”, Lectio Difficilior, 9/2 (2009) http://www.lectio.unibe.ch/09_2/kiperwasser.html (accessed 4 November 2016). Kiperwasser, Reuven, “Irano-Talmudica II: Leviathan, Behemoth and the “Domes­ tication” of Iranian Mythological Creatures in Eschatological Narratives of the  Babylonian Talmud”, in Shai Secunda and Steven Fine (eds.), Shoshannat Yaaqov: Jewish and Iranian Studies in Honor of Yaakov Elman (Leiden: Brill, 2012) 203–235. Kiperwasser, Reuven, “The Misfortunes and Adventures of Elihoreph and Ahiah in the Land of Israel and in Babylonia: The Metamorphosis of a Narrative Tradition and Ways of Acculturation,” in Ronit Nikolsky and Tal Ilan (eds.), Rabbinic Traditions between Palestine and Babylonia”, (Leiden: Brill, 2014) 232–249. Kiperwasser, Reuven, and Dan Shapira, “Irano-Talmudica I: The Three-Legged Ass and ‘Ridyā’ in B. Ta’anith: Some Observations about Mythic Hydrology in the Babylonian Talmud and in Ancient Iran”, Association of Jewish Studies Review 32 (2008) 101–116. Kister, Menahem, Studies in Avot de Rabbi Nathan: Text, Redaction and Interpretation (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi 1998) (Hebrew). Levene, Dan, A Corpus of Magic Bowls: Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity (London: Paul Kegan, 2003). Lieberman, Saul, “ ‘ That is how it was and that is how it shall be’: The Jews of Eretz Israel and World Jewry during Mishnah and Talmud Times”, Cathedra 17 (1980) 3–10 (Hebrew). Lieberman, Saul, Greek in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Life and Manners of Jewish Palestine in the II–IV Centuries C.E. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1942). Lieberman, Saul, Ha-Yerushalmi kifshuto (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1935). Lieberman, Saul, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Literary Transmission, Beliefs and Manners of Palestine in the I Century B.C.E.–IV Century CE (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1950). Lieberman, Saul, Tosefta kifshuta (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1955–1988) (Hebrew). Macuch, Maria, “Allusions to Sasanian Law in the Babylonian Talmud”, in Carol Bakhos u. M. Rahim Shayegan (eds.), The Talmud in its Iranian Context (Tübingen Mohr Siebeck, 2010) 100–111. Milikowsky, Chaim, Seder Olam: Critical Edition, Commentary and Introduction (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi 2013) (Hebrew).

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Montgomery, James A., Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur (Philadelphia: University Museum, 1913). Müller-Kessler, Christa, Die Zauberschalentexte in der Hilprecht-Sammlung, Jena und weitere Nippur-Texte anderer Sammlungen (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 2005). Naveh, Joseph and Shaul Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1987). Naveh, Joseph and Shaul Shaked, Magic Spells and Formulae: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993). Neusner, Jacob, A Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden: Brill, 1962). Neusner, Jacob, Development of a Legend: Studies on the Traditions Concerning Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden: Brill, 1970). Noam, Vered, Megillat Ta‘anit: Versions, Interpretation, History (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi 2003) (Hebrew). Rubenstein, Jeffrey L., The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore, MD.:‎‪ Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Safrai, Shmuel, “Tales of the Sages in the Palestinian Tradition and the Babylonian Talmud”, Scripta Hierosolymitana 22 (1971) 209–232. Safrai, Ze’ev, Mishnat Eretz Israel with Historical and Sociological Commentary (Jerusalem: E.M. Liphshitz Publishing House 2008–2013 to date) (Hebrew). Secunda, Shai, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in its Iranian Context (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2014). Segal, Judah B., Catalogue of the Aramaic and Mandaic Incantation Bowls in the British Museum (London: British Museum Press, 2000). Shaked, Shaul, James N. Ford, and Siam Bhayro, Aramaic Bowl Spells: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls I (Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection) (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Shinan, Avigdor, The Biblical Story as Reflected in its Aramaic Translations (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993). Shinan, Avigdor, The Embroidered Targum: The Aggadah in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan of the Pentateuch (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992) (Hebrew). Sperber, Daniel, Greek in Talmudic Palestine (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2012). Sussmann, Yaacov, Talmud Yerushalmi according to Ms. Or. 4720 (Scal. 3) of the Leiden University Library with Restorations and Corrections (Jerusalem: Academy of Hebrew Language, 2001) (Hebrew). Veltri, Giusepe, Magie und Halakha: Ansätze zu einem empirischen Wissenschaftsbegriff im spätantiken und frühmittelalterlichen Judentum (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997).

Some Concluding Thoughts Lisa Maurice The introduction of this book stated that there are multiple ways in which ancient Greeks, Romans and Jews feature in popular fiction. It is to be hoped that the essays in this volume, featuring both direct reception (straight retellings of ancient tales, books set in classical times and settings) and less direct influences (texts and elements drawn from the ancient world but recast in the modern), have demonstrated this. It is now time to examine briefly, therefore, what conclusions may be drawn as a result of these studies as to the nature of these receptions. Firstly, the sheer range of receptions is notable. Although this book references only a tiny, albeit representative, number of works, these works cover, to name just some variations: both Greece and Rome, from the Bronze Age to the late Empire; geographical locations that span the whole of the ancient world; varied genres; and different target audiences. Just as Classical Studies is the examination of an entire culture and period (or more accurately cultures and periods), so the receptions of the ancient world in popular fiction are myriad in style, content, genre and ideology. Secondly, this output is not only striking in terms of breadth but also in absolute figures. To give some idea of just how many books are available, with regard to historical fiction alone, the ancient Roman section of amazon. com lists more than 13,693 works; a search for ancient Greece within fiction produces 10,897. Ancient Egypt, by way of contrast, yields only 7,854, and “medieval England” only 8,099, in both cases a noticeable drop. While examination of Amazon listings is, of course, not a scientific method of judging popularity,1 they do reflect trends clearly enough for our purposes. The ancient world has held, and continues to hold, a fascination for both readers and writers, and one that seems more attractive than many other historical periods. Why then, does the ancient world hold such an abiding allure for authors and their audiences? Some reasons present themselves readily; both Rome and Greece are perceived to have provided the cultural backdrop for modern

1  Not all the listings, for example, are even of popular fiction; some classical texts in translation are also included, as well as some works of non-fiction; other works with very limited connected to the ancient world also seem to have slipped in.

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Western society,2 and as such, are regarded as known and familiar. This perception of familiarity stems from awareness of ancient physical remains and belief in classical influences on language, education, societal values, as well as a feeling of shared heritage, particularly in the case of Britain, conquered and settled by ancient Roman ancestors. These aspects all did undoubtedly influence the modern world. Similarly the traditions of Jews and Christians, for all the secularity of the modern world, are recognisable both as accepted mainstream religions, and as part of that same cultural fabric, especially in the context of the Greco-Roman world, where they are often presented in popular culture as heroic ancestors of Western society. Perhaps the strongest influence on the average twenty-first century global citizen’s feeling of familiarity with ancient society, is the depiction of that world in modern popular culture, particularly on screen. The popularity of both ancient Rome, the great military power (identified according to need with ideas as wide-ranging as imperialist, oppressive, fascist, communist, anti-Christian, corrupt, grimy, sophisticated, romantic, and immersed in luxury and wealth), and Greece (natural home of culture, homosexuality, gods, heroes, mythology, freedom, democracy and war against the barbarian East), has created a proprietorial mindset whereby the classical world is familiar and recognisable. Films based upon early Christianity (The Robe, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Ben-Hur etc.) have long captured the popular imagination, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. It is, in fact, perhaps coming to saturation point, as the explosion of movies and television programmes set in the ancient world over the past fifteen years testifies. Movies focussing on classical mythology (Troy (2004), Clash of the Titans (2010), The Immortals (2011), Wrath of the Titans (2012), The Legend of Hercules (2014) Hercules (2014), Percy Jackson (2010, 2013)) and series such as HBO-BBC’s Rome (2005–7) and Starz’ Spartacus (2010–13) dominate the popular cultural consciousness, and this impacts on the novels being written as well. In the case of the most recent works, books and movies have been produced almost in tandem, creating a fascinating interplay of influences between the two media that can be seen for example in the fanfiction the (combined) works have produced.3

2  See Peter N. Stearns, Western Civilization in World History (NY and London: Routledge, 2003) 38–44 for the limitations and selective nature of the connection between the ancient classical world and Western civilization. 3  The Hunger Games trilogy of novels was published in 2008, 2009 and 2010; the movies were released in 2012 and 2013 and 2015. For examples of fanfiction, see https://www.fanfiction .net/book/Hunger-Games/ (accessed 14/04/2015).

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The exploitation of familiarity can be seen in works such as the detective novels set in ancient Rome, where the ancient Eternal City takes the place of the modern urban environment, especially those from recent years which are influenced by the modern squalid and ‘realistic’ screen depictions of ancient cities.4 Books dealing with ancient Christianity and Judaism also rely on these stereotypes of Rome as brutal oppressor of the truth (although in this case the works often predate and influence the screen portrayals, rather than the other way around). Such attitudes underlie the analyses in this book by Haim Perlmutter and Emily Lord-Kambitsch in their respective papers. Such familiarity with the classical past occurs more subtly too. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, as Dor Yacobi has illustrated, the post-apocalyptic future depicted is tightly bound up with elements from the popular depiction of ancient Rome, so that the reader who understands these references will experience a multi-layered and satisfying understanding of the text. Other cases reflect the author’s familiarity with the classical past. This may be conscious, as in the case of Sol Yorick’s adaptation of Xenophon’s Anabasis in The Warriors analysed here by Eran Almagor. Other examples may even be unconscious, reflecting the author’s own knowledge and deeply internalised understanding of the ancient world. Thus, as Hamish Williams has shown, the Odyssey is an inspiration for Tolkein’s The Hobbit; to recognise this endows the reader with a deeper and more fulfilling understanding of the book. Often the familiar classical past is regarded in a glorified way, as the height of civilisation, possessing an inherent worth simply because it is classical. Because of this, there is an idea that the ancient world is a cultural and intellectual ideal, which has cultural value, and therefore a familiarity with it should be encouraged, or even assumed by the intellectual elite. This factor also contributes to its popularity, and is especially true with regard to children’s books, despite the difficulties involved in adapting such works for children. Such a concept lies behind the adaptations of ancient texts for children, as Lily Glasner indicates in her paper on adaptations of Cupid and Psyche for young readers, despite the problems inherent in so doing. These idealising attitudes also underpin works such as Madeline Miller’s The song of Achilles and Byrne Fone’s Achilles, a Love Story, as Anne Sinha has demonstrated. At the same time, however, that the ancient world is familiar, it is also recogniseably exotic. It is a place where scantily clad slave girls gambol around grape-eating reclining aristocrats, where bare bronze-torsoed heroes clash 4  On this see my article on Starz: Spartacus: Lisa Maurice, “Building a New Ancient Rome in STARZ Spartacus”, in Antony Agoustakis and Monica Cyrino (eds.), STARZ Spartacus: Reimagining an Icon on Screen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) 111–130.

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swords, where flying horses and snakey haired witches are part of the backdrop, where gladiators spill blood in the arena for the pleasure of the baying crowd. Familiarity does not breed boredom in the ancient world, where the exotic ‘otherness’ of the people provides a legitimate vehicle with which to provide forbidden sights for the modern audience. The attraction of the exotic and magical is one of the reasons for the popularity of works based on Greek mythology—the link between Harry Potter and Percy Jackson cannot be denied. Nor is this attraction limited to children however; the appeal for fan fiction writers is also clear, as Amanda Potter highlighted, again despite difficulties inherent in reconciling such a subject matter with modern sensibilities. Greece and Rome then are both familiar and exotic at the same time, a combination that enables the exploitation of either element, or both, or the dissonance between the two. As fantasy novels, for instance, Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games include elements of the exotic, in the dystopian world which she creates, but also the familiar, as the characters are brutally exploited and even murdered, in a manner reminiscent of Roman gladiatorial games.5 The reader who recognises this, and makes the connection, is therefore able to identify the otherness of ancient Rome—and Panem—while still getting the same thrill from the entertainment as the supposedly evil perpetrators of it. This dissonance between familiar worlds (in this case ancient Rome/Panem/ modern America) and the alien helps to create the dystopia, that is both recognisable on multiple levels and also markedly foreign. Similarly, the bringing together of the exotic and alien past and the apparently understood present helps create the thriller atmosphere in Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s The Ancient Curse, as Claudia Fratini has demonstrated. Such a combination of alien and known also allows for the examination of questions of identity, which have been a recurrent theme in the period under discussion; the setting or adaptation of an ancient culture that is both familiar and alien provides a means for the author to explore this topic. Different cultural values, as they are understood by the general populace to have been held in the ancient world, also provide a means for exploring roles and boundaries in the constantly changing world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. One of the areas that have undergone alteration in the same period is that of ideas about sexuality. Again, ancient Greece is perceived to be an optimal setting for homosexual love, and for writers to explore such sexuality in novel form, as Byrne Fone’s novel, examined by Anne Sinha, reflects. Similarly, as the status of women has changed, writers may use female characters in a patriarchal society to explore the issues faced by women in modern times. This 5  This aspect came to the fore even more strongly in the movie versions.

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transposition is not always easy, as is highlighted by the essays by Amanda Potter on Atalanta, by Anat Koplowitz-Breier on Lindsey Davis’ Flavia Albia novels and by Tal Ilan on Yochi Brandes and Maggie Anton’s works.6 These latter works also mark another difference between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and more recent times, namely the attitude to religion. Both Christianity and Judaism feature in popular depictions of the ancient world, and have traditionally coloured the portrayal of Rome as enemy and oppressor of the true religions. Thus, a subgenre of ancient Roman fiction concerning early Christianity flourished in a world where Christianity was not only the religion of the vast majority of the population of Western society, but also an important part of life, representing ethical and moral values as well as doctrine. With the secularisation of that society in recent years, books such as these have little relevance and the output has therefore dwindled away. An exception to this has been in the Jewish world, where, as Tal Ilan has shown, the expansion of the female role within Jewish Studies has also led to a new genre, of Jewish women writing about their ancient counterparts. Indeed, there has been a growth within Judaism of people returning to their roots (the so-called baal teshuva movement),7 and this, along with the opening up or rejection of orthodoxy in some cases, has led to the development of a group of writers highly educated in both secular and religious studies. This has caused a vibrancy that has led to a growth of such works, with authors such as Anita Diamant and Alice Hoffman contributing to the genre. It seems that the ancient world in all its myriad aspects, whether GrecoRoman or Judeo-Christian is perhaps more utilised in popular fiction now than ever before. Stimulated by the increase in popularity and accessibility of historical fiction generally, and by the continuing presence on the modern screen, and the perceived shared roots and values, writers continue to use ancient Greece and Rome for a wide range of purposes. Nor does it seem likely that this will change in the near future; with this in mind it is to be hoped that research into this fascinating field, for which this book provides a starting point, will also expand, as authors continue to encounter, invent and adapt the classical past according to the lights of their own societies.

6  Also addressed more briefly in in my own chapter on Roman detectives. 7  See Lisa Aiken, The Baal Teshuva Survival Guide (San Diego, CA: Rossi Publications, 2009).

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Index of Subjects Achad Haam see Brenner, Yoseph Haim Achilles 132, 133, 134, 153–171 erotic tradition concerning 161–62 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) 40 Akiva, Rabbi, see Aqiva, Rabbi Allegorical reading 202–203, 210 Alon, Gedaliah 235n49, 236n53, 241n69 Amazons 135, 137, 139, 141, 142, 143 Amboy Dukes, The (1947) 90 American Bible Society 263n21 American Idol 127, 128n American Revolution 260 American Tract Society 263n21, 265 Annanus son of Annanus 230 ancient world exotic nature of 24, 30–31, 45, 300–301 familiarity of 299–301 Antagonists, The 221–249 Antioch (city) 260 antisemitism 233, 239 Anton, Maggie 277–78, 283–86, 291–92 Aphrodite 135, 141, 142, 143, 148 see also Venus Apollodorus, Bibliotheka 134, 135 Apollonius, Argonautica 134 Apuleius see Metamorphoses Aqiva, Rabbi 278–79, 281, 287, 291 (wife of) 278, 282–84 Archive Fever 71n16, 72, 77 Derrida 77 Ares 138, 142 Artaxerxes II 87 Artemis 138, 139, 140, 143, 145, 148 Asia Minor 87 Atalanta 131–148 Athena 138, 142, 145 Athens 106n74 Atlantis (BBC) 136 Babylonia 278, 285, 287–88, 291 Talmud 279, 280, 282, 283, 284–86, 287, 291 Banerjee, Sankha see Foley, Ryan

Bar Kokhba (revolt) 286–87 Barthes, Roland 79 Battlestar Galactica 145–146 Baudrillard, Jean 116 Baumgarten, Albert 249n95 Beauvoir, Simone de 53, 60–61 Beitar 286 Ben-Gurion, David 227, 242, 244n80 Ben-Hur (1925 film) 262n Ben-Hur (novel) characters in Balthasar 260–1 Ben-Hur, Judah 257–8, 260–8, 270, 272–3 mother of 261n, 270, 272 Christ 260–1, 264–7, 270 Esther 267 Iras 167 Messala 258, 261, 267 Quintus Arrius 260, 272–3 Simonides 257, 261 Tirzah 270, 272 chariot race in 260–2 emotions in anger 258 compassion 265 familial love 258, 261 pity (see compassion) shame 260 vengeance 261–2 naval battle in 260 Mosaic Law in 260–2 paganism in 260 ‘phenomenon’ 256, 268 reader responses to in educational contexts 271n43 in fraternal organisations (see ‘fraternal organisations, Supreme Tribe of Ben-Hur’) in published reviews 269–70 in religious contexts religious conversion 270–1 Sunday schools 268, 271 religious conversion in 261–3, 266–7

332 Ben Hur (1959 movie) 121, 122, 125n27 Benjamin, Walter 88 Ben-Shallom, Israel 241n70 Ben-Yair, Elazar 221, 234, 240, 243, 246n89 Ben-Yehudah, Nachman 222n5, 224n8, 243 Ben-Zvi Yitzhak 227 Berdichevsky, Micha Yoseph 240 Bible 131, 264, 271–2 Biblical fiction (American) 263–4, 269, 273 Bimbo (fictional character) 91, 92, 100 see also Warriors, The (1965); Yurick, Sol Blackboard Jungle (1954) 90 Blume, Judy 200 Boccaccio, Giovanni 203–204 Borinquen Blazers (fictional group) 92, 95, 100 see also Warriors, The (1965); Yurick, Sol Bouguereau, William-Adolphe 209 Boyarin, Daniel 283–84, 291–92 Brenner, Yosseph Haim (Ahad Haam) 240, 241n71, 242 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 147 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 266 Brandes, Yochi 277–78, 281, 283–87, 291–92 Brener, Ann 292 Briseis 168–69 Browne, Ray B. 64 Butler, Judith 60–62 Byrne, Deirdre 119, 120 California 277, 291–292 Catching Fire 117, 120 Cawelty, John 51 Chain of Being, The 203n12 Chandler, Raymond 50–51 children’s literature 13, 198–217, 300 adaptations for children 198–199, 205–215 censorship and 200–201 controversial books in 200–201 Greco-Roman mythology in 198, 205–215 preventing harm and 200, 215 sexual abuse and 200, 207, 214–215 sexual content and 198–201, 205–207, 210–215 translation of 198 Chilton, Bruce 233n46, 238–239 Christianity 203, 209–210, 213, 291

Index Of Subjects in fiction 10, 14, 43, 203–4, 209–210, 238–9, 255–273, 299–302 Classical Reception and Popular Fiction 8–10 approaches towards 5–6 as cultural history 7 development of 5–8 Kantian aesthetics 6 vs. reception studies 5 Cohen, Shaya J. D. 221n3, 234n48 Colchians 95 Collins, Suzanne 114, 117 comics 96–98, 97n35, 99 Comic Code 200n6 myth of Cupid and Psyche in 208–215 Conan Doyle, Arthur 19 Coney Island 91–92, 94, 101 Cotton, Hanna M. 221n3 Craft, Charlotte M. 206–207, 213–215 Craft K.Y. see Craft, Charlotte M. crime fiction central features of 19–21 detective duos 20 female detectives 42–44, 49–64 ‘golden age’ 20, 37 Gumshoe 37–42 Hard-boiled private eye see gumshoe Origins 19–21 police procedurals 20 popularity 20, 24–5, 26, 38, 44 as mirror of society 21 Roman see Roman crime fiction Croall, Marie P. 211–215 Croft, A.M. 205 Crossover Literature 201, 213 Crucifixion (of Jesus Christ) 263–264, 266, 270 Cunaxa, Battle of 97; see also Cyrus the Younger Cupid in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses 201–205 in Boccaccio’s interpretation 203–204 in comics 208–215 in children’s literature 205–215 Cupid and Psyche (Craft and Craft) 206–207, 213–215 Cybele 135 Cyrus the Younger 87, 89, 93, 97, 100, 106–7

333

Index Of Subjects D’Annunzio 71(n) Davis, Lindsey 11, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 38, 42, 43, 44, 49–50, 61, 63–64 Deadly Elections 50, 53, 57, 62 Enemies at Home 50, 53, 56, 62–63 Master and God 63 Nemesis 50 The Course of Honour 63 The Graveyard of the Hesperides 50, 53, 57, 62 The Ides of April 50, 52–53, 55, 57–59, 62–63 The Jupiter Myth 58–60 The Silver Pigs 49 Debord, Guy 114 115 Deidamia 156, 168–69 delator 33 Deleuze, Gilles 126n30 detective novel 73, 75 Derrida Of Grammatology 69(n) Archive Fever 71(n) Positions 77 Dewey (fictional character) 91, 92, 94, 97, 100, 101, 102, 109 see also Warriors, The (1965); Yurick, Sol Diaspora 287–89, 291–92 Dominators (fictional group) 91, 92, 93, 95n28, 96, 100, 101, 103 see also Warriors, The (1965); Yurick, Sol Domitian 52–53 Dover, Kenneth 161–62 Downie, Ruth 28, 29, 36, 44 Dragon Ball 141, 144 ekphrasis 98 Eliezer, Rabbi 281 Elman, Yaakov 290 Elon, Emuna 292 emotions and classical reception 255 and ethnography 257–8, 267 and historical fiction 259, 262, 273 and religious faith 258, 260–2, 265–7, 270 in Ben-Hur (see Ben-Hur (novel), emotions in) epic code 162

Eros see Cupid Essenes 229, 247–248 Evans Grubbs, Judith 56–57 Expendables, The 134, 139–140 Fabulae Antiquae see Croft, A.M. Falco, Marcus Didius 26, 28, 30, 33, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 49–55, 59, 61, 63–4 fandom 256 fan fiction 4, 12, 131–148, 154 n. 7 Fantuzzi, Marco 161n32, 162 Feldman, Louis 226 feminism 278, 283 Fifty Shades of Grey 131 Final Fantasy 141, 144 Finley, Moses I. 57 Finkelstein, Louis 237n57, 238n61, 278–79, 283–84 Fitzgerald, Jon 124 124n24 Flavia Albia 11, 28, 33, 43, 44, 50–64 Foley, Ryan 208–211, 213–215 Fone, Byrne 154–156, 159–160, 163–67 Foucault, Michel 125, 155 Frankel, Jonah 281 fraternal organisations Maccabees 271, 271n47 Supreme Tribe of Ben-Hur 268, 271–3 Court Degree Ritual 273 membership 272 freedom Fighters 224 Frumentarii 32, 43n71 Gamaliel, Rabban 281 Gann, Ernest 221–240 gay studies 155–156 gender 53, 57, 60–63 genre fiction see popular fiction Gerard, David Washington 271 Germany 292 Gilligan, Carol 203–204 Gladiator (2000) 9n31, 23, 26, 121, 122, 125n27 gladiators female 119, 120, 129 in ancient Rome 115n5, 116n5, 118, 119, 123, 124, 125n25, 126 in modern culture 114, 115, 116, 127, 129 Gordianus the Finder 28, 30, 33, 39 Goren, Rabbi Shlomo 225

334 gothic novel see thriller Great Awakening 263 Greco-Roman mythology 198, 205–215 Golden Ass, see Metamorphoses Goldhill, Simon 259 Grafton, Sue 54 Greece and Rome in popular fiction attraction for authors of 1, 8–10, 301–2 Popularity of 298–302 Range of 298 Greek 289 Greek culture 100, 105–6, 109 Guttman, Shmarya 225n10, 227, 243 Haaland, Gunnar 231n35, 232 Hades 142–3 Halivni-Weiss, David 289 Hall, Alice 119n10 Halperin, David 162 Harris, Robie H. 200 Harry Potter 137, 138 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 205 Hector (fictional character) 91, 92, 96, 100, 108n78 see also Warriors, The (1965); Yurick, Sol Heinämaa, Sara 60 Herald of Gospel Liberty 270 Hercules: The Legendary Journeys 135 Hercules (2014) 135 Hercules, the animated series (Disney) 141, 142, 147 Hercules: The Thracian Wars 135 Hephaestus 138, 144 Hermes 138, 144, 145 heterotopia 125–127 Hill, Walter 89 see also Warriors, The (1979) Hinton (a fictional character) 91, 92, 94, 95n28, 101, 102n51, n52, 103–4, n65, 105, 107–9 see also Warriors, The (1965); Yurick, Sol Hippomenes 135, 140, 144, 146 Hisda, Rav, daughter of 278 Hisdadukh 284–87, 291 Historical Fiction 2, 9–10, 21–24, 67 neo-historical fiction 24 historical artefact, reinvention of 68 historical crime fiction 24–5

Index Of Subjects Hobbit, The Bilbo as host 176–181, 183–184 Bilbo as magician 190–191 Dwarves as guests 182–185 Dwarves as hosts 190–192 Elrond as host 188 Gandalf as guest 177–178 Gandalf as magician 181–182, 183, 184, 187, 194–195 Gandalf as mediator with nature 189–190 hospitality as ethics 194–196 hospitality story 176, 192–194 Mirkwood, Aeaea, compared 188–189 nature as host 189–190 Trolls, Polyphemus, compared 186–187 Hollister, M. Jonathan 123, 123n10 Holmes, Sherlock see Conan Doyle, Arthur Holocaust 291 Homer 256 Iliad 95n28, 97, 132 Odyssey Athena as helper 182 Hospitality as sacred ritual 175n10, 194 Hospitality summarized 175–176 Odysseus as guest 181n46, 186–187 Odysseus as magical/divinely inspired 181–182 Odysseus as mediator with nature, the divine 189–190 Phaeacians as hosts 178–181 Suitors as guests 183–185, 192 Telemachus as host 183–184 homosexuality 160, 165–68 ‘How I Came to Write Ben-Hur’ (lecture)  257, 269 Hunger Games, The 141, 143 intertextuality 116, 118, 119, 120, 125, 128, 129 post-apocalyptic future 117, 120, 128, 129 Hunt, Peter 51–52 Hutcheon, Linda 198n Hyde, Lilian Stoughton 205 Hyginus, Fabulae 134, 135 Iliad see Homer immortality 246

Index Of Subjects

335

incantation bowls 285 Ivanhoe (novel) 259

martyrdom 264 Masada 221 “Masada Myth” 222, 224–229, 236 Mini-Series 221n4 Mason, Steven 231n37 Maurice, Lisa 40n63, 221n4, 225n15, 228n24, 229n27, 243n79, 300n4 McGuire, Riley 121n17 Students Revolution 115n2 Medusa 138 Mercenaries 87, 89, 91, 94, 100, 105, 106n74 see also Ten Thousand, The Meleager 134, 140, 148 Melanion 135, 141, 142, 144, 146 Metamorphoses 199, 201–206, 208n21, 211n26, 214–215 Miller, Madeline 154, 156, 158, 163, 167–170 Mills, Sophie 118n8, 122n20 mise en abyme 98 Moby Dick (1851) 109n79 Mockingjay book 120n14, 121, 124n23 bird 124, 124n24 symbol 123–124 Morgan, David 265 Mossynoecians 94, 95n27 see also Ten Thousand, The Muller, Marcia 54 mythology, classical 10, 13, 131–148, 198–205

James, P. D. 54 Jamnia 236 Janeus, Alexander 247 Jason 134 Jason and the Argonauts (2000) 135 Jerusalem 225n15 Judaism in fiction 14, 221–249, 277–293 Orthodox 243 Secular 243 Junior (fictional character) 91–92, 94, 95n27, 96–7, 100, 102 see also Warriors, The (1965); Yurick, Sol Jupiter 202n11, 203–206, 210, 212 Kamtza and Bar Kamtza 234n47 Kaplan, Ann 60 Kedar, Dorit 292 Kingsley, Charles 205 Kirtland, John Copeland see Ritchie, Francis Klawans, Jonathan 231n35, 232, 246n87 Krass, Andreas 154 Kuklin, Susan 200, 206 Kyle, Donald G. 119n9, 119n10 Ladouceur, David J. 226n17, 244n83 Latham, Don 123n22 Latin 289 Last Days of Pompeii (novel) 266–7 Glaucus 266–7 religious conversion in 266–7 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyano 107n76 Lentulus, Publius 265 Lieberman, Shaul 288–89 looting 80 Lukács, Georg 259 see also ‘necessary anachronism’ Lunkface (fictional character) 91, 92, 97 see also Warriors, The (1965); Yurick, Sol

Nativity (of Jesus Christ) 260–1, 263 ‘necessary anachronism’ 259, 262 Neriah Rabbi Moshe Zvi 226 Neusner, Jacob 233n46, 238–239, 280–82 New Testament 229, 230 New York City street gangs 88n3, 89–90, 99, 105, 107n47, 109 see also Warriors, The (1965); Yurick, Sol New York Times 269 Nordau, Max 240, 241n68 Noyer, Albert 29, 36, 44

Macbain, Bruce 29, 35–6 Manifest Destiny 258 Manzoni 67–68 L’ombra della sera 69(n) Marks, Martha 29, 42–3

Odyssey see Homer Oedipus 203, 207, 212 Ogden, Bethany 54 oracle 202, 205n16, 206, 208 Ovid, Metamorphoses 134, 135

336 pacifists 245 pageant culture 114, 115, 116, 121 Pahalvi 290 Pan-Opticon 127, 127n Panem Panem et circenses 114 State of 114, 117, 124 Papa Arnold (fictional character) 91–92, 103 see also Warriors, The (1965); Yurick, Sol Paradis, Kenneth 54 Paretsky, Sara 54 past and present, interactions of 69 Patroclus 153–171 Peleus 134, 139, 142 Percy Jackson 132, 133, 138, 139, 141, 145 Persia, Persians 87, 89, 93, 105, 107 Peters, Ellis 24–5 Pharisees 221–254 Pharnabazus 108 Phersu 74(n) Pliny the Younger 35–6 Poe, Edgar Allen 19 Pollon 144 Pogson Smith, Sarah 264 popular culture 9, 15, 90, 109, 206n29, 128, 171, 195n110, 299 definition of 3 popular fiction definition of 1–3 development of 3–4 Greece and Rome in 8–10 relationship with the past in 78 study of 8–9 sub-genres 2, 9–10, 11, 19, 23, 24, 26, 45 Poseidon 138, 139, 144 primordial child 80 prophet 286–87 Psyche feminism and the figure of 203–204, 211, 213 in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses 201–206 in Boccaccio’s interpretation 203–204 in comics 208–215 in contemporary children’s literature 205–215 suicide attempts of 202, 206, 211n26 vindictiveness of 202, 206

Index Of Subjects Psyche & Eros: The Lady and the Monster (Croall and Randall) 211–215 publishing strategies 157–59 Qumran 222 Rabbinic 222 Rabikovich, Dalia 283–84 Rachel 283, 285, 287 Rami bar Hama 284 Randall, Ron see Croall, Marie P. Rappaport, Uriel 224n10, 226n17 Rashi 278 Rava 284 reality television 114, 115n14, 116, 119n10, 123, 127, 128, 128n Regev, Eyal 231n34, 245n84 reinvention of historical artefacts as looting 68n4, 72, 73n19, 80–81 as moral action 69, 80 Religion see Christianity, Judaism religious conversion 260–1, 263–4, 266–7 Resh Laqiah 292 Rich, Adrienne 213n28 Riordan, Rick 198 Ritchie, Francis 205 Ritchie’s Fabulae Faciles see Ritchie, Francis rite of passage 101, 104 Rivera, Ismael (fictional character) 91–92, 93, 94, 97, 100, 107, 108, 109n79 see also Warriors, The (1965); Yurick, Sol Roberts, John Maddox 2, 27, 28n34, 30, 34, 39 Roman crime fiction popularity of 26–8 problems of adapting 28 setting of 28–31 Roman detectives, fictional Female 42–45 historical background of 31–33 macho nature of 41–42 social status of 33–37 urban setting of 39–41 Rome 50–53, 56, 58–59, 63–64, 281, 289, 291 popular depiction of 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 23, 25, 26, 35, 40–41, 45, 115, 121, 255, 298–299 Rood, Tim 87n1, 98

337

Index Of Subjects Rosenfeld, Ben-Zion 235n49 Rowe, Rosemary 29, 37, 39 Russia 292 Sadducees 221–254 Safrai, Samuel 241n69 Saint Seiya 144 Saldorini Anthony 231, 235n49 Saturday Review 270 Saylor, Steven 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, 39 Scaggs, John 51 Scodel, Ruth 262n Scott, Walter 259 scrolls 229 sex 53, 58, 60 sexual abuse 200, 204–205, 207, 211–212, 214–215 compulsory heterosexuality 213n28 sexuality 13, 21, 58, 60, 63, 64, 121n17, 184n62, 201, 207, 301 Shapira Anita 240, 241n68, 241n70, 242n73, 244n80 Shavit, Zohar 198–199 Shimon Ben Gamliel 241, 286 Sicarii 224n10, 227n20, 229 Silberman 237n57 Silva, Flavius (Roman Commander)  246–248 Smith, Morton 224n10 Society of Spectacle 114, 115, 128 See also pageant culture Spartacus 121–122, 125n27 speculator 32 Starz’ Spartacus 26, 40n63, 299, 300n4 Stolen Hearts: The Love of Eros and Psyche 208–211, 213–215 Students Revolution 115n2 Stegeman, Hartmut 248n94 Stern Menachem 234n48, 244n83 subaltern 78 Suetonius 52 suicide 221, 226 Sussman, Yaacov 288 taboo subject 199, 201, 212 Tel Hai 242 Ten Thousand, The 87, 89, 91, 94, 95n29, 97n35, 102

see also Cyrus the Younger, Mercenaries, Xenophon text, meaning of 69, 78 Thetis 157, 158, 167, 168 Thibron 108 Tissaphernes 108 thriller 79 Tolkien, J. R. R. Classical education 174–175 on Homer 175 Tomc, Sandra 54 transgender transgendering 63–64 transgenderism 60 Troy (2004) 26, 132, 153–54, 164, 299 True Love Cupid and Psyche’s myth as a tale of 208–214 feminist criticism of the popular concept of 208 in popular literature 208 male-rescuer archetype and 209–210 Trumpeldor, Joseph 242 Twilight 131, 137 Ulysses 31 144 United States attitudes to Jews and Judaism 262, 262n Civil War 256, 273 Protestantism 262–3, 265, 268, 270 and biblical fiction (see biblical fiction (American)) and Christology 263, 265 and gender relationships 267–8 Reconstruction 273 see also American Revolution, biblical fiction (American), Great Awakening, Manifest Destiny Venus 201–204, 206, 208, 211, 214n29 Vergil 256 Veyne, Paul 213 Vespasian 50, 52, 234, 241, 246n89 Vietnam War 88n4, 100 virginity 204–205, 212 interfectae virginitatis 204–205, 207 vomitorium 118

338 Wallace, Lew and Christian faith 256, 263, 269, 271 and readers (see Ben-Hur (novel), reader responses to) autobiography 256, 259 celebrity persona 256, 269, 271, 273 Walt Disney 198, 208 Warriors, The (1965) (novel) 87–113 see also Yurick, Sol Warriors, The (1979) (movie) 89, 99 see also Hill, Walter Watership Down 138, 141, 145 Weston, Kath 60 West Side Story 90 Winks, Robin 49 Wishart, David 28, 29, 30, 34, 39, 49n3 Wonder Woman 137, 139 Xena: Warrior Princess 137, 141, 142, 143, 147 Xenophon 87, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 102, 105, 107, 108, 109 Anabasis 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105, 106, 108, 109

Index Of Subjects Yadin, Yigael 222, 223, 229n27, 239 author 225n11 excavator at Masada 222 personality 239 Yavneeli Shmuel 242 Yavneh 281 Yehoshua, Rabbi 281 Yerushalmi (Talmud) 288 Yishmael, Rabbi 281 Yohanan (Rabbi) 292 Yohanan ben Zakkai 234–236, 241, 280 Young Justice 139 Yurick, Sol 87–113 see also Warriors, The (1965) Zephyrus 202, 208, 211 Zerah, the Believing Jew 264 Zerubavel, Yael 222n5 Zeus 135, 144 See also Jupiter Zionism 287 Zionist Movement 222, 224 Offensive Zionism 242 Zion’s Herald 271

Index of Ancient Sources Aeschines Against Timarchus 161 Aeschylus The Myrmidons 161 Homer Iliad 163, 164, 165, 168n73, 170 n79 Plato Symposium

161n30

Sophocles Loves of Achilles 161 Statius Thebaid 162 Achilleid 162 Xenophon Symposium 161 mMeaser Sheni 5:9 279 tHagigah 2:3 281 yShabbat 6:1, 7d 282 yTaanit 4:5, 68a 281 bBerakhot 44a 283 bBerakhot 56a 284, n. 18 bBerakhot 61a 286, n. 21

bBerakhot 61b 281 bBerakhot 62a 284 bShabbat 129a 284 bShabbat 140b 284, n. 18 bEruvin 65a 284 bPesahim 49b 279 bPesahim 107a 286, n. 21 bPesahim 110a 286, n. 22 bHagigah 5a 284 bYevamot 34b 284, n. 18 bKetubbot 39b 284, n. 18 bKetubbot 62b 279, 281, 282 bKetubbot 65a 284, n. 18 bKetubbot 85a 284, n. 18 bGittin 31b 286, n. 21 bQiddushin 32b 286, n. 21 bQiddushin 81b–82a 284, n. 18 bNazir 50a 282 bBava Batra 12b 284 bBava Batra 21a 279 bAvodah Zarah 11b 286, n. 21 bAvodah Zarah 20a 281 bHullin 44b 284 Bereshit Rabbah 101:10 279, 280, 281 Avot de Rabbi Nathan A:6 280, 282, 283 ----- B:12 280, 282