Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics: March (2007)
Abstract
This chapter of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Ancient Novel, ed. Tim Whitmarsh, (2007) surveys the pervasive presence of religion and the sacred in the extant Greek and Roman novels and addresses the much discussed issues of its roles and functions, with an emphasis on the challenges the topic poses to the interpretation of the genre’s core erotic ideology. It also explores instances of the fictional imagination at work in absorbing, modifying, and creatively refining a few selected religious elements.
Religion plays a central role in the plot of virtually every fictional narrative, influencing the lives, actions, mentality, practices, beliefs, and eventual fates of the characters (and narrators); the types, interventions, and motives of divinity or other uncanny forces; the use of mythological exemplars, and more broadly, the array of problems that the entire subject poses for interpretation of the genre’s conventions. The novels are full of: temples, shrines, altars, priests, rituals and offerings, dreams (or oracles), prophecies, divine epiphanies, aretalogies, mystic language and other metaphors of the sacred (not forgetting, in addition, exotic barbarian rites). Indeed, religious elements, such as these, familiar to virtually any inhabitant of the ancient world, are richly attested, of course, in history and archaeology. The topography of any ancient city, for example, would be unrecognisable without its temples and shrines, its statues and votive offerings, its frequent public festivals and processions, and its generally familiar modes of worship. Such is the case in the novels, for all their differences, in which its characters range far and wide in the course of their wanderings and communicate with the sacred in these habitual ways, whether in the cities of Asia Minor (Ephesus, Miletus, Rhodes, Sidon, Byzantium), Egypt (Memphis, Thebes, Alexandria), Greece (Delphi, Corinth), Italy (Syracuse, Rome) and elsewhere.
Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton University)
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics: March (2007)
Abstract
This chapter of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Ancient Novel, ed. Tim Whitmarsh, (2007) surveys the pervasive presence of religion and the sacred in the extant Greek and Roman novels and addresses the much discussed issues of its roles and functions, with an emphasis on the challenges the topic poses to the interpretation of the genre’s core erotic ideology. It also explores instances of the fictional imagination at work in absorbing, modifying, and creatively refining a few selected religious elements.
Religion plays a central role in the plot of virtually every fictional narrative, influencing the lives, actions, mentality, practices, beliefs, and eventual fates of the characters (and narrators); the types, interventions, and motives of divinity or other uncanny forces; the use of mythological exemplars, and more broadly, the array of problems that the entire subject poses for interpretation of the genre’s conventions. The novels are full of: temples, shrines, altars, priests, rituals and offerings, dreams (or oracles), prophecies, divine epiphanies, aretalogies, mystic language and other metaphors of the sacred (not forgetting, in addition, exotic barbarian rites). Indeed, religious elements, such as these, familiar to virtually any inhabitant of the ancient world, are richly attested, of course, in history and archaeology. The topography of any ancient city, for example, would be unrecognisable without its temples and shrines, its statues and votive offerings, its frequent public festivals and processions, and its generally familiar modes of worship. Such is the case in the novels, for all their differences, in which its characters range far and wide in the course of their wanderings and communicate with the sacred in these habitual ways, whether in the cities of Asia Minor (Ephesus, Miletus, Rhodes, Sidon, Byzantium), Egypt (Memphis, Thebes, Alexandria), Greece (Delphi, Corinth), Italy (Syracuse, Rome) and elsewhere.
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