BACKGROUND

The intellectual milieu of seventh-century Mecca and Medina into which the Qur'an came was rustic, and bore no resemblance to the environment of the urbanised, far more literate societies of the organised empires of the Romans and Persians to the north. While literacy was nowhere widespread in early medieval times, it seems to have been especially lacking in the Arabian peninsula, where the prevalent Arabic language appears not to have possessed a written literature before the seventh century. On the other hand, the groundwork for Islam had apparently been laid orally, for the Qur'an presupposes a society of a certain sophistication of thought. Part of this sophistication was a familiarity with monotheism (Qur'an 29:61, 63; 31:25; 39:38; 43:9, 87), despite the well-entrenched and confident paganism native to the Arabs. While Arab familiarity with the monotheistic idea is unmistakably the fruit of centuries-old contact with Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, Arab isolation persisted, and knowledge of the abstract thought of the neighbouring high cultures was limited.

Such a situation of illiteracy and isolation provided the opportunity for the emergence of a new religious movement, precisely because the Arabs were not already committed to one of the existing literate traditions. This opportunity was realised when the Prophet Muhammad began to proclaim a new message from God, first privately at Mecca, and then publicly in that city, and finally from 622 in Medina.

In a New York Times Magazine interview with Frank Rich, Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930) told an anecdote as revealing as it was charming. Reminiscing about the New Haven opening of Carousel in 1945, when he was fifteen, the composer/lyricist recalled the emotional impact of the first act's closing moments. ‘I remember how everyone goes off to the clambake at the end of Act One and Jigger just follows, and he was the only one walking on stage as the curtain came down. I was sobbing.’ In the next paragraph, however, Sondheim displays a more characteristic caginess when considering why Carousel is his second favourite score. (Porgy and Bess is his favourite.) After suggesting that he might be drawn to Carousel ‘because it's about a loner [the protagonist Billy Bigelow] who's misunderstood’, Sondheim dismisses the thought, calling it ‘psychobabble’. Later in the interview, he returns to this somewhat defensive argument, noting that, after all, ‘the outsider is basic to a lot of dramatic literature. This country's about conformity. And so nonconformity is a fairly common theme.’

Non-conforming outsiders are indeed inherent in much dramatic literature. American musicals, however, have generally avoided them, and certainly their presence as protagonists in musicals before Carousel is rare. Even their existence as important supporting characters is unusual. Notable exceptions exist, of course. They include the mulatto Julie in Show Boat (1927), the discovery of whose racial heritage results in her dismissal from the showboat company and her subsequent tragedy, and Jud Fry in Oklahoma! (1943), whose angry isolation is voiced in the disturbing number ‘Lonely Room’. With the possible exceptions of Pal Joey (1940) and the opera-derived Carmen Jones (1943), however, musicals before Carousel were not about these outsiders.

The concept of “revelation” is usually considered to have for correspondents, in the Arabic language, words formed on the basis of two different roots: WHY and NZL. In English translations of the Qur'an, wahy is commonly understood as “revelation” and awhā as “to reveal” or, sometimes, as “to inspire” or “to incite”. In non-religious contexts, however, a fundamental meaning expressed by the root seems to be that of a sound or noise, rapid and blustering like thunder. Words derived from the second root, like nazala, nuzūl, nazzala and anzala, all relate to the ideas of “coming down”, “descending”, or “sending down”, and have a strong place-related physical connotation. In the Qur'an, they are used much more often than the words derived from WHY. Once examined together, the various qur'anic occurrences of these two groups of terms convey the clear image, not of the “unveiling” evoked by the word “revelation”, but rather of a solemn or even awe-inspiring communication, literally originating “from on High”: “If We had sent down this Qur'an upon a mountain, you would have seen it humble itself and split apart by the fear of God” (59:21).

The affirmation that such a transcendent communication takes place in the history of mankind is most often conceived in Islam through the dimensions of prophethood and messengership, from which it is therefore sometimes difficult to distinguish the thematic of revelation. The latter should, however, not be studied exclusively in relation to its recipient but also from the viewpoint of its divine origin and of the modalities of its transmission. This means, first and foremost, that a proper understanding of God as “revelator” must be developed.

INTRODUCTION

Law represented one of the earliest models of intellectual activity in Muslim culture, and traditionally lay at the core of Islamic learning. To be a “scholar” ('0ālim), whatever else it meant, was invariably to be a scholar trained in God's sacred law. Although the legal scholar did not possess the gift of prophecy, he was deemed a “successor of the Prophet”. By virtue of issuing independent legal opinions, the jurisconsult (muftī) in particular occupied a social position which in some ways was reminiscent of that of the prophetic lawgiver himself.

Because of the centrality of law in the Islamic tradition, Muslim society and culture are best accessed through it. For more than a millennium, the religious law constituted the Muslim world's most constant, characteristic and unifying feature. Mainstream Sufism was the only other dimension of Islam that enjoyed a comparable influence, but (contrary to the misperceptions of an older generation of historians) it, too, was erected on the law's foundations. Today, when many aspects of traditional Islamic society are disappearing, the religious law remains central to the Islamic consciousness, even in Muslim nations that have adopted secular legal systems.

The Alexander Romance is a fictionalised account of Alexander's conquests that stands at what many take to be the beginning of the novel writing enterprise in antiquity. The story opens with the last pharaoh of Egypt, Nectanebo II, learning that his country was about to be conquered, fleeing to Macedon, setting up shop as a magician, and seducing Philip's queen Olympias. Nectanebo, not Philip II, fathers Alexander, and as a result Alexander is both Macedonian-Greek and Egyptian, a potent fiction that enables him to lay claim to Egypt. At the same time he remains the pupil of Aristotle and the heir of his apparent father, Philip. Heliodorus' Charicleia and Theagenes is the last of the five Greek novels that have survived intact. One of its main characters, white-skinned Charicleia, was exposed at birth, rescued and brought to Greece where she was raised as an upper-class Greek girl. After adventures that carry her from Greece to Egypt and Ethiopia, she is reunited with her natural parents, who happen to be the black-skinned king and queen of Ethiopia. Charicleia appears Greek, but biologically she is not Greek at all. At the moment of her conception, her mother was gazing at a picture of Andromeda awaiting rescue from the sea monster by Perseus. That image of Greek womanhood was so powerful that it altered the course of nature and the resulting white child was exposed to protect her mother's reputation. In The Alexander Romance and Charicleia and Theagenes the conventional oppositions of Greek and barbarian are intentionally joined in characters whose behaviour clearly allows them to act Greek, whatever their ethnically distinctive parentage.

Interest in the history of sexuality, perhaps more than any other factor, has defined the genre of the ancient novel as we now know it. As the focus in scholarship gradually shifted, during the last few decades of the twentieth century, from women's studies to the study of gender and sexuality, the ancient novels, with their flamboyant attention to the erotic, appealed to the Zeitgeist. This led to their greater exposure, largely through the work of the philosopher and cultural historian Michel Foucault, and subsequent discussions. A less positive outcome has been to privilege the 'erotic' novels over other works of imperial prose fiction, and thus to narrow our conception of the genre. Had biography or travel narrative driven the agenda as hard as the history of sexuality has (and is doing), what we commonly understand as 'the ancient novel' might look rather different. If an interest in the history of sexuality has directed how the ancient novels have been conceived as a genre, then attitudes towards sexuality have influenced the treatment of individual works on an even more fundamental level. They have determined how the novels are transmitted: how the physical texts of the novels reach their readers. Scribes, editors, and translators through the ages have amended and athetised the texts according to their moral beliefs. A revised version of the earliest English translation of Petronius' Satyrica in the Victorian era rewrote the 'Pergamene boy' scene of same-sex seduction as the (reassuringly heterosexual) 'Pergamene girl'.

Narrative is now a permanent fixture in modern criticism on the Greek novel. Under the pervasive influence of narratology, popularised particularly by Gérard Genette and Mieke Bal, concepts such as 'embedded narrative', 'narratees' and 'focalisation' (these terms will be glossed in the course of my discussion) have become a familiar part of the armoury of literary theory. This chapter has no pretensions towards recapitulation of the standard formal analysis of the narrative structure of the novels, for which the reader can consult works that are readily available. Instead, it seeks to show how a grasp of narrative and narrative theory can offer a sharply defined critical vocabulary permitting a subtler grasp of wider issues of literary and cultural interpretation. Novels, after all, specifically challenge their readers to decode a variety of types of speech, assembled more or less loosely into a single framework. At one level, the issue is one of genres: the Greek novels allude to a staggering range of different literary forms, from epic, lyric and drama through historiography and philosophy to oral narrative. More than this, however, they also incorporate a variety of different perspectives upon the world, and strategies for understanding it.

Denounced through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century for its triviality, smuttiness, and pastiche (to say nothing of intimations of 'oriental' influence), the Greco-Roman novel began to find in the late years of the last century a much more enthusiastic audience. Perhaps better than any other ancient form, the novel embodies the spirit of (post-)modernity; of a prosaic world, politically and ethically complex beyond compare yet questing after simple truths, pluralist yet hierarchical, riven by global homogenisation. Art, literature, music, dance and film have all drawn inspiration from these texts. The worlds of scholarship and teaching have been similarly energised: across the world university programmes, conferences, organisations, websites and publications testify to the vitality of novel studies. The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel offers eighteen new essays by internationally distinguished experts in the field of Greek and Roman narrative fiction. It seeks to provide students, scholars and the interested public with a sophisticated yet accessible point of entry into these beguiling texts. It is not designed as a general survey: although it is aimed at readers new to the novels as well as those with more familiarity, the Companion has no text-by-text discussions, and indeed no single agenda. Rather it consists of a series of state-of-the art provocations, interlocking in overall design but written from a range of intellectual positions. Taken together, these essays represent both the culmination of the latest thinking on the novel and a stimulus to future exploration.

The bodies of the ancient novels are hard to ignore: beautiful, chaste bodies, god-like bodies, ugly bodies, dead bodies, fragmented bodies, penetrated bodies, animal bodies, bodies that are hard to tell apart from one another. The novels confront us with these forms insistently. Some of them look easy to interpret, as shining examples of chastity and virtue, qualities that manifest themselves inevitably in beauty. But many of them are enigmatic, unstable, hard to fathom. Here I want to emphasise two main issues in the challenge of reading the novels' bodies: first the way in which these texts both proclaim and problematise the status of physical appearance as a guarantor of inner identity; and second, the way in which the bodies they present us with are so often equivalent in form to the texts themselves, metaphors and mirrors for the very experience of reading. / Bodily integrity and elite identity / The elite society of the imperial period was preoccupied with the way in which social status left its marks on the surface of the human body. The way you dressed, the way you carried yourself, the way you exercised your body said a great deal about who you were. This was an age when gymnasium education, rhetorical prowess (with its obsessive attention to the bearing and physical training of the orator), and philosophically informed attention to bodily self-care were more prestigious then they ever had been, and when public violation and mutilation of the body in punishment were used more routinely and extravagantly than before to signify loss of social status or political influence.

The surviving Greek and Latin novels depict a world of cities, but mostly keep Rome itself out of sight. The racy Latin novels by Petronius and Apuleius (and his Greek source) are set in the imperial present, but make few direct remarks about Rome and its emperors. The (more-or-less) chaste, idealising and nostalgic Greek novels by Chariton, Longus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus are mostly set in vaguely classical times, when Greek cities were still free. Nevertheless, just as historians write the story of their own times as they tell the story of the past, so too the escapist fictions of the novelists do not escape their imperial context. Some critics interpret the nostalgic setting of the Greek novels as a strategy of withdrawal. On this view, when Alexander and his successors and then Rome rule over Greece and Asia Minor, city-state gives way to empire, and the traditional work of citizenship is no longer as consequential as it once was: elite audiences are drawn to the novels' stories of individuals adrift in a chancy world. Others, by contrast, understand the nostalgic and idealistic Greek novels as an affirmation of a specifically Greek cultural identity and a celebration of the continuation of Greek civic practices after the imposition of Roman hegemony.

“POET O anxieties of mankind! O how great is the emptiness in matter! / BYSTANDER Who will read this? / POET Are you talking to me? No one, by Hercules. / BYSTANDER No one? / POET One or two people, or no one. / BYSTANDER A shameful and wretched outcome.” (Persius, Satires 1.1-3) / 'Who read this?' is a question which scholars of the ancient novel, perhaps more than those engaged with any other Greek or Roman literary form, have persistently and anxiously posed. The opening of Persius' first Satire, a poem that may close with one of the very few references in literature of the high classical period to one of the extant Greek novels, ought to make us ask 'Does it matter?' We might, however, first consider why the Greek (in particular) novel has attracted this special anxiety about readership - and why it does indeed matter.

In his monumental work Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur distinguishes 'tales about time', like The Magic Mountain or Remembrance of Things Past, from 'tales of time', which all narratives are by virtue of the fact that they are read and unfold in time. Few would put the ancient novels into the former category; they are not explicitly about time in an abstract sense, that is, they rarely discuss time in a philosophical or reflective fashion. Much scholarship has instead focused on how the novelists manage their 'tales of time' - for example how Heliodorus manipulates the temporal order of events in his narrative or how Apuleius orchestrates a subtle shifting between his narrator Lucius' past and present temporal point of view. We can even speak of the tempo or pace of the novels when we examine the way in which they vary the relationship between narrating time (measured in words and pages) and narrated time (measured in days, hours, years). Such narratological work on the novelists' deployment of time has produced valuable insight into their story-telling technique, and I refer to it throughout this chapter. But there are other ways of talking about the novels' conception of time. Every novel conveys a certain temporal feeling to its readers - what Ricoeur calls 'the fictive experience of time' - not only through explicit commentary and rendering of narrative time, but also via thematic content, employment of temporal reference and the depiction of its characters' experience of time. One influential attempt to describe novelistic genres on the basis of their represention of such temporal (and spatial) experience, or chronotope, was proposed by the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.

After an interval of some eight centuries, the genre of the novel was resurrected in twelfth-century Byzantium by four writers: Theodore Prodromos, Niketas Eugenianos, Eustathios Makrembolites and Constantine Manasses. They modelled their four novels after the novels of the second sophistic period, particularly those of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus. Points of similarity include plot elements, characterisations and stylistics, as well as lavish use of allusion and rhetorical display. Like the novels of the second sophistic, the Byzantine novels were written in Atticising Greek and addressed principally a learned audience. In an intensely Christian world, these new novels also resurrected the ancient novels' pagan gods and rituals. Yet in reviving the novel, these writers were also striving to create something different and new. Evidence from such varied sources as collections of sayings, poems and critical writings shows a continued readership of the ancient novel during the mediaeval Greek period. The best evidence of a sophisticated and attentive readership of the ancient novels is found in the twelfth-century revivalist novels. Many factors can be associated with the genre's revival. With the rise of Christianity the appeal of the novel had transferred to other types of narrative, for example, to apocryphal stories and saints' lives, with their novelistic themes of chastity, trials, separations, reunions and salvation in the end.

A recent volume which attempts, as this one does, to provide readers with a broad survey of the ancient novel includes in its final chapter a set of maps traversed by bold-faced lines. The maps generally show the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, and the lines represent the routes followed by the heroes and heroines of the extant novels (as well as of several epics and other narratives) as they roam back and forth, tempest-tossed, across that expanse. These maps form a curious supplement to a study of a literary genre, but one which makes sense given the degree to which this genre relies on a sense of place for its aesthetic effects. 'Travel is such a delineating feature of the ancient novels (except for Longus and Apuleius) that we felt obliged to highlight [the routes of their characters]' remarks the editor, Gareth Schmeling, in his preface, adding his hope that such maps will help readers zero in on the places 'which ancient writers considered fascinating, exotic, enchanting or mysterious enough to warrant visits by their heroes and heroines'. The following discussion takes its cue from Schmeling's words and attempts to supplement, in a verbal rather than pictorial medium, the map included with the present volume.

“One Day after this as she came into the Room where all we poor children were at Work, she sat down just over against me, not in her usual place as Mistress, but as if she set herself on purpose to observe me and see me Work: I was doing something she had set me do as I remember, it was Marking some Shirts which she had taken to Make, and after a while she began to Talk to me: Thou foolish Child, says she, thou art always Crying; (for I was Crying then) Prithee, What dost Cry for? Because they will take me away, says I, and put me to Service, and I can't Work House-Work; well Child, says she, but tho' you can't Work House-Work, as you call it, you will learn it in time, and they won't put you to hard Things at first; yes they will says I, and if I can't do it they will Beat me, and the Maids will Beat me and make me do great Work, and I am but a little girl, and I can't do it, and then I cry'd again till I could not speak any more to her.” / Style is an essential characteristic of the modern novel. In the passage above, from Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, it is not narrative technique so much as the style - syntax, and the selection, arrangement and use of words - that is crucial to Moll's portrayal of herself as a child. Verbal repetition ('thou art always Crying; (for I was Crying then)') and paratactically arranged sentences or phrases ('and I am but a little girl, and I can't do it, and then I cry'd again') link the spoken dialogue of Moll's recollection to her present discourse. The expression of these sentences has a childish quality, even though it is really the adult Moll Flanders who is telling the story. That effect in Defoe is related to an identifiable stylistic device that is common to the point of being almost ubiquitous in fiction in German, Russian and the romance languages, as well as in English.

Although this is the last chapter in this volume, the modern reception of ancient texts should not be considered a mere learned appendix. We inevitably read any kind of text from the perspective of our culture; a creative rewriting by a modern artist is an extension of the process of cultural dialogue that underlies all interpretation. The specific case of the novel is quite complex, because modern attitudes towards this genre have slowly changed from hostility to acceptance, finally achieving the dominant position they have now. This process has influenced not only our understanding but even our conceptualisation of the ancient novel. The analysis of contemporary rewritings, as we shall discover, can shed new light on these issues. Let us begin with a significant date: 1876. In this year Erwin Rohde - a prominent figure in the worlds of classical philology and the history of religion, a supporter of Friedrich Nietzsche in his polemic against the German academy - published a huge work on the Greek novel, still considered a critical masterpiece. In the same year Leo Tolstoy was completing the publication of Anna Karenina, which he had begun in 1873. This synchronism can be a good starting point for getting to grips with the meaning of the ancient novel in contemporary culture. At the end of the ninenteenth century, a new philological approach to the ancient novel began just at the time when the modern novel definitively reached a hegemonic position in the system of literary genres, and enjoyed its most flourishing era.