This chapter examines the interplay and boundaries between ancient heroic and didactic epic poetry, particularly in the Hellenistic and imperial periods, treating didactic poets such as Aratus, Nicander, Dionysius the Periegete, Oppian, ps.-Oppian, and ps.-Manetho, whose poems are rooted in the early didactic epic tradition associated with Hesiod. Emphasising that didactic poetry was widely deemed a subset of the epic genre by ancient literary critics, the chapter examines didactic epic as both a controversial form of verse and a perceived vehicle for cultural prestige and wider cosmic truths in the ancient world. Setting didactic poetry against prose literature, heroic epic poems and allegorical readings of the Homeric epics, Kneebone draws attention to the rich and assimilative traditions of post-classical didactic epics.

While some Classicists have made cases for the birth of fiction, linking it to various authors and texts, others have argued that fictionality is a core concern of Greek literature from its beginnings to the Imperial era. In chapter 2, I agree with the idea that fictionality did not have to be discovered at some point but then proceed to argue that neither did it ever play an important role. After presenting evidence for the familiarity of fictionality in antiquity, I reconsider two authors who often appear as cornerstones in histories of fictionality, Gorgias and Aristotle. A closer look at their reflections draws our attention to two dimensions of ancient narrative that were deemed far more important than its referentiality, namely its immersive quality and its moral thrust.

Perhaps the most prominent cognitivist concept in recent narratology is the Theory of Mind. Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine and others have been highly influential with their claim that mind reading is at the core of our engagement with narrative in general. However, these scholars have not only ignored how controversial the idea of the Theory of Mind is in psychology – ancient literature, I believe, also belies their argument about narrative at large. Mind reading is certainly central to our responses to modern realist novels, but ancient narratives, as my test case, Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, illustrates, were more invested in the reconfiguration of time than in individualized minds. Plot was crucial for the experiential quality of narrative hailed by critics, as shown in Chapter 2. This prominence of plot is reflected in Aristotle’s Poetics and other critical works. In order not to play off plot against character, I propose experience as a category that integrates cognitive processes as well as matters of plot.

After acknowledging the important contribution of structuralist narratology to the study of ancient literature in the past decades, the first chapter highlights its price: forged mostly in the reading of modern novels, narratological taxonomies have occluded peculiarities of ancient narrative and its understanding of narrative. I discuss various alternative approaches to ancient narrative and then introduce the one chosen in this book: I take key concepts of modern narrative theory and explore how ancient texts relate to it. Instead of striving to prove the existence or prefiguration of these concepts in antiquity and thereby to prove ancient literature as modern avant la lettre, I will zero in on the fault lines, where the ancient sense of narrative does not map onto our categories.

The idea of a narrator that is distinct from the author is a basic tenet of narratology. In ancient criticism, however, this idea absent. What is more, ancient critics tended to ascribe utterances of characters in general to authors. This, I argue, is not a deficiency but the expression of a distinctly ancient view of voice, which I reconstruct on the basis of a wide array of texts. Where we see several narrative levels nested into each other, ancient authors and readers envisaged narration as an act of impersonation. One upshot of my analysis is that, while it may be intriguing to explore metalepseis in ancient literature, the very idea of metalepsis conflicts with the premises of narrative as it was understood in antiquity. The ancient view of narration can be linked at least partly to the prominence of performance and therefore reveals the impact of socio-cultural factors; at the same time, it resonates with recent cognitive theory, notably embodied and enactive models of cognition.

Chapter 5 touches on some of the points brought up in Chapter 3, notably ancient views of character, but has a different focus – narrative motivation, a category prominent particularly in story-oriented narratology. The Odyssey is the origin of the classical Western plot, and yet the motivation of the Penelope scenes in books 18 and 19 does not follow the logic which modern realist novels have made our default model. Instead, I suggest, Odyssey 18 and 19 have a design premised on features that we encounter in medieval narratives, notably retroactive motivation, thematic isolation and suspense about how. The reason why Penelope has provoked innumerous psychologizing interpretations in modern scholarship is that her comportment is not psychologically motivated by Homer. Similar cases of motivation that are bound to strike the reader of modern novels as peculiar can be found in Homer and also later literature. At first sight, these cases may seem to conflict with the emphasis on motivation in Aristotle and the scholia, but in viewing motivation in terms of plot rather than psychology, the critics share common ground with the texts discussed.

Imperial ekphrasis is the topic of Chapter 8. The disinterest in the aesthetics of deception in Hellenistic epigrams is continued in the ekphrastic works of Callistratus and the Philostrati. They use the term apatē not infrequently but, by and large, do not tie aesthetic illusion to deception in an ethical sense. It is another text, commonly disregarded as simple and unsophisticated, that intriguingly plays with the ambiguity of apatē. I will argue that the Tabula Cebetis, besides toying with the recession of representational levels, also uses the personification of Apatē in the painting it describes to associate aesthetic illusion with moral corruption, thereby issuing a reading instruction for itself. In fact, it can even be argued that in the Tabula Cebetis the aesthetics of deception, which Lucian had marshalled to criticize protreptics, helps preempt this criticism.

Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, discussed in Chapter 10, still awaits its discovery by scholars of ancient aesthetics. The latest of the five fully preserved ancient Greek piercingly reflects on the aesthetics of deception. After a close reading of a passage from book 3 that sharply juxtaposes deceit and aesthetic illusion and simultaneously intimates their similarity, I will explore their blending together in the Athenian novella. The aesthetics of deception also pertains to the Ethiopica themselves, which are designed to enthral the reader and simultaneously threaten to dupe her. A Platonic intertext that evokes the condemnation of poetry in the Republic highlights this danger. At the same time, Heliodorus recasts the aesthetics of deception differently from Plato and suggests an allegorical reading of his novel that envisages aesthetic illusion ultimately as a means of overcoming deception.

Plato is not only a key figure in the history of the aesthetics of deception; the focus of my study also permits us to reassess his criticism of poetry in the Republic. Chapter 4 examines how Plato takes seriously Gorgias’ playful entwinement of aesthetics with ethics and uses it to give new substance to the charges against poetry that Gorgias had deflated. For Plato, immersion is a central factor of the harm done by poets. After exploring his entanglement of aesthetic illusion with the corruption of the soul, I consider passages that seem to respond to Gorgias and help us capture the similarities and differences between the two thinkers. Finally, I contend that, while unanimously condemned by a broad alliance of scholars, Plato’s view of poetry is premised on an assessment of aesthetic experience that turns out to be valid when seen in the light of cognitive studies.

Chapter 7 moves on to Lucian, who extends the field of reflection by conjuring up the entwinement of deception with aesthetic illusion, not exclusively but chiefly in texts devoted to philosophy and its pretensions. Philopseudes uses the allure of superstitious tales circulated by philosophers to contemplate the effect of immersive narrative at large; Nigrinus calls upon the aesthetics of deception to expose the shortcomings of protreptic discourse and facile ideas of conversion; Hermotimus compares philosophical misguidance to the effects of visual art and poetry. However, Lucian’s engagement with the aesthetics of deception is not confined to ridiculing philosophy; it is carried by a serious concern with the effects of logos as diagnosed by Plato. The high reflexivity that the form of dialogue and the layering of narrative levels generate in the discussed texts can be seen as a response to the danger inherent in immersion.

Deceit plays a major role in Sophocles’ Electra, the subject of Chapter 3. As I will argue, the messenger scene at the core of this play blends together deception and aesthetic illusion – the lie of the paedagogus about Orestes’ death relies on a highly immersive narration to be analysed from an embodied and enactive perspective. It would be more than bold to envisage Electra as inspired by Gorgias fr. 23 DK; what Sophocles’ play does is show that the association of deception and aesthetic illusion pinpointed by Gorgias was somehow in the air and could be exploited to great dramatic effect. I will also suggest that Electra features reflections on aesthetic illusion that contain the seeds of the later rhetorical category of enargeia.

In the second chapter, I first present other texts from the Classical period that use apatē to signify the effect of theatre and other forms of representation. These texts give evidence for the wide circulation of apatē as an aesthetic term, perhaps – this is my tentative suggestion – as a result of a Gorgianic coinage. Then, I critically examine the tendency to view Gorgias fr. 23 DK merely as paving the way for Aristotle’s Poetics. This view is in danger of confounding aesthetic illusion with fictionality and ignores the salience of apatē’s enmeshing of aesthetics with ethics.

The ekphrastic play with verbal and iconic representations reveals that not only literature but also pictures can effect apatē. Chapter 9 is devoted to a piece of early Christian apologetic writing that cashes in on the ambiguity of apatē for an assault against pagan idolatry. Clement’s Protrepticus, an interesting document for the multifaceted attempts of the early Christians to negotiate the relation of their faith with pagan culture, is couched in the language and imagery of the culture it is criticizing; it not only takes up specific theories of perception, but also knowingly transfers the aesthetics of deception from poetry to pictures. While other apologetes assume that demons instrumentalize statues for their deception, Clement makes the capacity of iconic representation for deception itself a cornerstone of his deconstruction of pagan modes of viewing.

Plutarch’s De audiendis poetis, discussed in Chapter 6, is one of the first testimonies to the resuscitation of apatē as a critical term in the Imperial era. In defending the educational function of poetry, Plutarch is responding to Plato. While Plutarch’s positive view disagrees with Plato’s negative verdict, his argument, as I will argue, is predicated on Plato’s association of immersion with corruption. Plutarch, after acknowledging poetry’s spell, lays out a strongly reflexive mode of reading intended to render the young readers immune to the dangers of absorption. His agenda has been appraised as prefiguring the modern hermeneutics of suspicion, but there are also important differences to be noted. Besides drawing our attention to the role of Plato, De audiendis poetis suggests further reasons for the appeal of apatē in the Imperial era, notably a culture of rhetorical epideixis that put a premium on captivating performances and the socio-political function of literature for the Greek elites in the Roman empire that gave new prominence to its ethical dimension.

The exploration of the ancient aesthetics of deception takes its cue from Gorgias fr. B 23 DK. After contemplating the fragment in its original contexts – Plutarch cites it in two different treatises – I will argue that Gorgias’ assertion derives its poignancy from the transformation of several topoi. What reads like a mere witticism is the result of a crossing of an epistemological tradition with an ethical paradox and a poetological premise, all under the auspices of aesthetics.

Hellenistic criticism provides little material for my study; Chapter 5 tries to grasp why this is due not only to its scanty transmission. Neither critics who championed pleasure as the function of poetry nor the ekphrastic tradition seem to have taken an interest in apatē’s ambiguity. We find more evidence at the beginning of the Imperial era in the critical essays of Dionysus of Halicarnassus and in Philo’s polemics against a specific kind of rhetoric and myth. Only Philo, however, exploits apatē’s oscillation between aesthetic illusion and deception. Philo’s debts to Plato help us identify one reason for apatē’s decline in Hellenistic criticism: as some scholia illustrate, Plato’s criticism of poetry was well-known but was often felt to be less compelling than the ideas of other philosophical schools. With due caution, I also suggest that the waning interest in apatē is related to the emergence of the Hellenistic book-culture that made it easy to contemplate aesthetic issues independently of ethical issues.