Greek Mythography in the Roman World

363 Pages·2004·1.83 MB·English

by  Alan Cameron

Greek Mythography in
the Roman World
Alan Cameron
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Greek Mythography in the Roman World
AMERICAN PHILOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
AMERICAN CLASSICAL STUDIES
VOLUME 48
Series Editor
Donald J. Mastronarde
Studies in Classical History and Society
Meyer Reinhold
Sextus Empiricus
The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism
Luciano Floridi
The Augustan Succession
An Historical Commentary on Cassius Dio’s “Roman History”
Books 55–56 (9 B.C.–A.D. 14)
Peter Michael Swan
Greek Mythography in the Roman World
Alan Cameron
Greek Mythography in
the Roman World
Alan Cameron
1
2004
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cameron, Alan, 1938–
Greek mythography in the Roman world / Alan Cameron.
p. cm.—(American classical studies ; v. 48)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-517121-7
1. Latin literature—Greek influences. 2. Latin literature—History and criticism.
3. Rome—Civilization—Greek influences. 4. Mythology, Greek—Historiography.
5. Mythology, Greek, in literature. I. Title. II. American classical studies ; no. 48.
PA3070.C36 2004
470.9'15—dc22 2003047112
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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Preface
Despite an extraordinary surge of interest in Greek mythology over the last few
decades, there has been no corresponding interest in our sources of informa-
tion about the myths. Books on mythology have been appearing at an alarming
rate in most modern languages, but not a single comprehensive study of the
mythographers. Of course, we know many famous episodes in the great mythical
sagas direct from the classics (Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, the Attic tragedians), not
to mention monuments of archaic and classical art. But any alert reader who has
tried to follow up earlier or later stages of even the most familiar stories in a care-
fully documented handbook like Timothy Gantz’s indispensable Early Greek Myth
(1993) must be aware that countless details we take for granted are first men-
tioned not by Homer or Aeschylus or even Callimachus but by some anonymous
Roman or even Byzantine hack. Where did they get their information, and how
reliable is it?
Those who teach Greek mythology in American colleges usually assign their
students the Bibliothecaascribed to Apollodorus, a convenient survey of most of
the main stories. It is indeed a handy, well-arranged, comprehensive manual, with
many virtues. But what are its credentials? A precise date is out of reach, but it is
not likely to be earlier than the first century of our era and might be as late as the
third. In the Bibliotheca’s defense, critics often confidently assert that it is “drawn
from excellent sources,” a claim based on its frequent direct citation of specific
texts from archaic and classical poets and mythographers, citations we can in one
or two cases actually verify ourselves. That is to say, the writer gives the appear-
anceof an easy, firsthand familiarity with the entire range of relevant texts. But
this is an illusion. In all probability he came by most of his citations at second (or
third) hand and had never even seen an original copy of many of the texts he quotes
(Ch. V. 3). The same will usually apply to the scholiasts, however much we might
like to think that some particular scholion bristling with plausible details and
viii PREFACE
archaic citations was copied directly from one of the great Hellenistic critics,
working in the library at Alexandria surrounded by books.
Apollodorus is probably the only mythographer most students (or scholars
for that matter) have ever looked at. There is a handy (if misguided) old Loeb
by J. G. Frazer, and the recent annotated translation by Robin Hard with useful
tables and indexes (Oxford 1997) is especially helpful.1 Some may also have
dipped into Parthenius, who made a rather furtive entry into the Loeb series, as
an appendix to Daphnis and Chloë. My own point of departure into this murky
field of study was a Latin text, the Narrationes, a series of summaries of the
successive stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The few scholars who have paid this
work any attention at all have dismissed it as late (sixth century, if not medi-
eval) and utterly lacking in value. It is indeed of little help to readers of the
Metamorphoses. It is not the Ovidian text it illuminates but the needs of Ovid’s
less cultivated early readers.
In the first place, it can be dated much earlier than generally assumed. No one
has noticed that it draws on a work that can be dated before 300 AD and may well
be earlier still (Ch. I. 3–5).It is in fact a compilation of the second or (at latest)
third century. But what first caught my attention was a number of similarities
between the Narrationes and a sequence of summaries of the successive stories
told in the various poems of Callimachus, called by what is after all the Greek for
Narrationes,Diegeseis, in particular the way both give occasional source references
(Ch. I. 1 and III. 3). These source references are reminiscent of both Apollodorus
and Parthenius, and I soon discovered that they are one of the most characteris-
tic features of early imperial mythographers. The few scholars even to notice the
citations in the Narrationesderived them from an otherwise entirely lost ancient
commentary on the Metamorphoses.But there is no evidence that any such com-
mentary ever existed (Ch. I–II). The source references come in fact from earlier
mythographers. The Narrationes turns out to be a typical mythographic work of
the early empire.
Further investigation revealed more such parallels and more such works, texts
that I have called “mythographic companions,” the most substantial and impor-
tant being a companion to all three poems of Vergil, partially preserved in the
Servian corpus (Ch. VIII). Diegeseis and mythographic companions constitute a
hitherto unidentified group of nonphilological aids to the reading of classical texts
(both Greek and Latin) in the Roman ages: Cliffs Notes to the Classics. They
illustrate, in fact, how people with only a modest literary culture were able to
navigate difficult classics like Callimachus and Aratus, full of often obscure mytho-
logical allusions (Ch. VII).
There is a reason these works have hitherto passed under the radar of literary
historians. Over and above the fact that most are anonymous, they are also de-
rivative and undistinguished, for all their parade of learned source references not
1. The utility of the extensively annotated French translation by Jean-Claude Carrière and
Bertrand Massonie (Paris 1991) is much reduced by the lack of an index.
PREFACE ix
based on genuine research, at best preserving otherwise unknown stories or other-
wise unknown details of familiar stories, of uncertain authority. Their interest and
importance lie in their sheer number rather than any individual specimen of the
genre. Almost all date from the first two centuries of the empire. Their authors
are not interested in the sort of questions about the meaning and function of myth
that have exercised most modern students—and many ancient writers. The
mythographic companions are not even interested in how the poet they are ex-
plaining used the myth in question. They just tell the stories, where possible with
that evidently all-important learned reference.
I devote much space (especially Ch. V–VI) to the question of this elaborate
and often very precise documentation (titles and even book numbers), the more
intriguing in that so much of it is derivative, and not a little actually bogus. Critics
have long been uncomfortably aware that the engaging mixture of mythology,
history, and fantasy offered, complete with extensive and elaborate source cita-
tions, by Ptolemy the Quail (Chennos) and Ps-Plutarch’s Parallela minora and
De fluviis is unreliable, but few have been hard-hearted enough to admit that it is
pure fiction, sources and all (Ch. VI). Ptolemy and Ps-Plutarch belong with the
Historia Augusta in an as yet unwritten chapter of the history of forgery. Even more
or less honest compilers like pseudo-Apollodorus clearly try to give the impres-
sion they have directly consulted texts they only know at second hand. Despite
strong evidence to the contrary, scholars have often been tempted to believe that
Proclus produced his summary of the Epic Cycle directly from the original text
on the basis of his claim that it survived to his own day. T. W. Allen was outraged
at the assumption of German sceptics that Proclus had “deceived his public.”2
No contemporary would have taken such a claim seriously.
Yet by no means all the strange variations on familiar tales found in unlikely
places are fabrications. Some are genuine local versions that simply chance to be
first recorded in some late text. For example, the people of Xanthos (in Lycia) and
Ephesos believed that Artemis was born at Xanthos and Ephesos, respectively,
not (as most of the poets said) on Delos. Improbably enough, the Ephesian ver-
sion is first reported by Strabo and Tacitus. The student of classical poetry can
happily ignore such curiosities, but not the social historian of Greco-Roman Asia
Minor. A great many probably quite ancient mythological traditions are only at-
tested by the coinage of some small city or an entry in the Ethnicaof Stephanus
of Byzantium.
It is a commonplace that ancient writers in general eschew precise documen-
tation, above all historians. Arnaldo Momigliano underlined the importance of
Eusebius’sEcclesiastical History in attributing “a new importance ... to documen-
tary evidence.” Paul Veyne objected that Eusebius did not so much cite sources
as transcribe excerpts, as Porphyry, Diogenes Laertius, and others had done before
him. By carefully arranging his excerpts in chronological sequence, Eusebius cer-
tainly produced something closer to history than his predecessors, but he was not
2. Homer: The Origins and the Transmission (Oxford 1924), 56.