The Romance Between Greece and the East

在希腊化晚期和帝国早期，出现了一种新的希腊文学体裁：散文小说。它是从哪里来的？以一种更具挑衅性的方式提出这个问题：这部小说是希腊人发明的吗？或者，它是从近东进口的吗？自17世纪以来，这个问题一直以各种形式存在，但在‘文化战争’的氛围中变得更加紧迫(对于古希腊的学生来说，马丁·贝纳尔的黑色雅典娜是最明显的象征)。这部小说如今被视为最规范、最“欧洲”的文学形式，任何判断它来自希腊还是来自非亚世界的尝试，显然都会牵涉到政治问题。大多数研究方法可归结为两大阵营之一：要么仍由19世纪的希腊主义民族主义模式所决定(这种模式倾向于将希腊身份呈现得比实际更连贯、更无处不在)，在这种情况下，他们倾向于认为用希腊写的小说本质上是希腊的；或者，他们满足于观察(据称)希腊文本与几个世纪(有时是几千年)前所写文本之间的相似之处，在这种情况下，他们通常强调埃及、美索不达米亚、波斯或赛罗帕里斯坦的起源。这一系列研讨会采取了不同的方法。他们没有追溯到过去，而是探索了这样一种假设，即希腊小说是由与周围世界打交道的人写的，种类繁多。这部小说--这就是命题--最初是一种文化混合形式。许多小说家来自不同文化相遇的地方：例如，阿喀琉斯·塔提乌斯来自埃及地中海沿岸著名的多元文化城市亚历山大市；赫利奥多鲁斯是来自埃米萨的腓尼基人，著名的闪族宗教埃拉加巴尔(Elagabal)就是从那里传入罗马的。它还将处理比大多数学者认为的古代小说更广泛的文本，包括例如《亚历山大·罗曼史》--一部起源于埃及的作品，将亚历山大塑造成法老--七十年代更浪漫的部分(例如丹尼尔、以斯帖)，以及不断出现在埃及的大量纸莎草纸碎片。如果我们去掉我们知道如何定义一部小说的假设，那么我们最终会得到一幅更有趣、文化交融得多的希腊化和帝国希腊故事文化图景。这些研讨会不仅探索古代小说，还思考我们应该如何概念化复杂的多民族社会的文学生产和文化交流。在理论层面上，这涉及到与后殖民思想的严肃接触。例如，霍米巴巴能在多大程度上帮助我们研究古代的杂交种？但也有一些更传统的问题，与传播机制有关。故事是如何在不同文化之间传播的？有证据表明，故事不仅以文本形式传播(这很昂贵，因此往往是大都市富人的专属)，而且还以口头和哑剧的形式传播？

In the late Hellenistic and early imperial periods, a new Greek literary genre appeared: the prose fiction. Where did it come from? To ask the question in a more provocative form: did the Greeks invent the novel? Or, alternatively, was it imported from the Near East? This question has been around, in various forms, since the seventeenth century, but has gained new urgency in the 'culture wars' climate (of which Martin Bernal's Black Athena is, for students of ancient Greece, the most visible symbol). Any attempt to decide whether the novel, now seen as the most canonical and 'European' form of literature, came from Greece or the Afro-Asian world, will clearly have political implications.Most approaches fall into one of two camps: either they are still determined by nineteenth-century nationalist models of Hellenism (which tend to present Greek identity as much more coherent, and indeed omnipresent, than it really was), in which case they tend to see novels written in Greek as essentially Greek; or they content themselves with observing (alleged) similarities between Greek texts and those written centuries (sometimes millennia) earlier, in which case as a rule they emphasise Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Persian or Syropalestinian origins. This series of workshops takes a different approach. Rather than tracing the genre back in time, they explore the hypothesis that the Greek novels were written by people engaging with the world around them, in all its variety. The novel was - this is the proposition - originally a culturally hybrid form. Many of the novelists were from places where cultures met: Achilles Tatius, for example, was from Alexandria, the famously multicultural city on Egypt's Mediterranean coast; Heliodorus was a Phoenician from Emesa, whence the famous Semitic cult of Elagabal (imported into Rome under the Severans). It will also deal with a wider range of texts than most scholarship on the ancient novel considers, including e.g. the 'Alexander Romance' - a work of Egyptian origin, which casts Alexander as a Pharaoh - the more 'romantic' parts of the Septuagint (e.g. Daniel, Esther), and the numerous papyrus fragments that keep turning up in Egypt. If we remove the presumption that we know how to define a 'novel', then we end up with a much more interesting and culturally promiscuous picture of the story culture of Hellenistic and Imperial Greece.The workshops do not only explore ancient novels, they also think about how we should conceptualise literary production and cultural interchange in complex, multiethnic societies. At a theoretical level, this involves serious engagement with postcolonial thought. How much can (for example) Homi Bhabha help us with ancient hybridities? But there are also questions of a more tradition nature, to do with the the mechanics of transmission. How did stories travel between cultures? Is there evidence that stories circulated not only as texts (which were expensive, and thus tended to be the preserve of the metropolitan rich), but also orally and in mimes?