#Diogenes quest full#
Here Schmedt argues strongly in favor of one of the two reconstructions of the scene proposed by Parsons, namely that the wizard Paapis is being sentenced to be burned at the stake (a fate he somehow avoids, as we can infer from Photius), and that his satchel full of books with magic spells is to be tied around his neck and burned together with him. Among the new fragments, particularly noteworthy is the discussion of P. The section on PSI 1177, a fragment with 30 lines of Greek, runs to 65 pages (compared to eight in Stephens and Winkler). Having examined all five in person, Schmedt offers for each a full diplomatic edition, literary edition, translation, and commentary. Schmedt’s treatment of the papyri-the two that featured in Stephens and Winkler as well as three new ones that Parsons has edited and attributed with varying degrees of confidence to Antonius Diogenes-is especially thorough. The book concludes with three appendices: the first lists plot elements of the five surviving complete Greek novels and shows how they stack up against those of Antonius Diogenes, the second compares authentication fictions in ancient literature, and the third lists Pythagorean elements that appear in the novel and elsewhere in the tradition. The second half offers a systematic treatment of topics covering the novel’s language and style genre and the place of Antonius Diogenes among the novels intertextual and thematic relationships with both Greek and Latin works (noteworthy here is that Schmedt follows Ní-Mheallaigh in seeing Lucian’s True Stories as a deliberate sequel to and not a parody of Antonius Diogenes, 449) the role of philosophy and cult (asserting that in its treatment of Pythagorean themes the novel maintains an ironic distance, targeting personality cults that grew up around figures like Pythagoras, 483-492) and themes and motifs such as travel, silence, magic, letters, and liminality.
What constitutes roughly the book’s first half establishes a firm new foundation for the study of the novel by compiling, translating, and providing detailed line-by-line commentary on all the surviving fragments and testimonia, including several that have appeared or been identified since the 1995 edition and translation by Stephens and Winkler. A sensitive exploration of how Antonius Diogenes’ novel engages with themes of fiction, truth, and credibility is just one of the many contributions offered by Schmedt’s exhaustive study, a revised version of her doctoral thesis. Kirk of a hero who sails the world in a quest to expand the limits of human knowledge, and whose motive for exploration-he has left his home in Arcadia κατὰ ζήτησιν ἱστορίας-represents one of many learned shout-outs to the historiographic tradition a descent to the underworld that begins among the Cimmerians (as in the Odyssey) who here in all probability are located in Italy (and presumably near Lake Avernus, the entrance to Hades where the Aeneid‘s katabasis is set) and of course, as narrated in the 24th and final book, a trip to the moon itself, where a Sibyl who has taken up residence there delivers prophecies and grants wishes to the intrepid crew who have boldly gone where no man has gone before.įor Photius, whose summary in Codex 166 of the Bibliotheca is our sole source for virtually all the above details, this last apiston is the most unpistevable of all. It had it all: embedded narratives of such complexity that those of Plato’s Symposium (an important touchstone here) pale in comparison a frame story featuring buried wooden tablets, à la Diktys of Crete, that are discovered by the entourage of no less a figure than Alexander the Great a first-generation Pythagorean as a supporting character whose eyes wax and wane with the phases of the moon an evil Egyptian wizard as principle antagonist who can send people into a catatonic trance by spitting in their face a James T. When it comes to the ancient Greek novel, The Incredible Things Beyond Thule is the big one that got away.
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