The Ancients - Dirty Love: The Ancient Greek Novel

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

The novel, and in particular the romance genre, is at the heart of a billion dollar industry, but when did they originate? In this episode, Professor Tim Whitmarsh from the University of Cambridge takes us back to some of the world’s earliest fictional narratives, the novels of Ancient Greece. Tim and Tristan explore the themes of this literature, the elements of it which are echoed in modern novels, its possible links with Persian, Jewish and Indian literature, and the stories of cultural hybridization found in the texts. Tim is the author of Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast we're going back to ancient literature and a particular form of literature that was really, really popular in the Roman imperial period. Now this was the ancient Greek novel, these love stories

from antiquity, but as you're going to find out, it's so much more than just Greece, the geography, the structure, the style of these stories. It's incredible. Now, I was delighted to get on the show, the one, the only, Professor Tim Whitmarsh from the University of Cambridge. Tim, great speaker. He is a leading expert on the ancient Greek novel. He's written a book all about it and it was great to get him on the podcast. So without further ado, here's Tim. Tim, thanks for coming on the show. It's a real pleasure. Now, the ancient Greek novel, this is, as we were just chatting before we started,

this is a remarkable form of literature that became culturally fluid and flexible. Well, also culturally central as well, I'd say. I mean, this is the dominant literary form of the first four centuries AD or CE, if you prefer. So it's the Greek literature of the Roman imperial period, and probably the first genuinely imaginative Greek literary form that was born into a world of books as well. So it's completely different in its feel and its mode of circulation from earlier Greek literature. It's designed to travel around the Roman Empire and exploit all that sort of connectivity of roads and peaceful seaways and that sort of thing. And we can see that it travels because we know that, for example, Carusens Caleroe, the earliest Greek novel composed probably in the mid-first

century CE, within 60, 70 years, papyri turn up in Egypt, even though it's composed in modern Turkey and Asia Minor. So it's travelling hundreds of miles in a very short space of time. So, as I say, a completely different form of Greek literature composed and created for a different era, and has that cultural fluidity and flexibility built into it because it's designed to travel. And because it's designed to travel, it's probably a difficult question. I mean, how can we define an ancient novel? Well, that's a really good question. The ancients themselves constructed their literary categories in the Alexandrian Museum in what we call the Hellenistic period. So third to second centuries BCE. And that's when they decided what, I mean, I'm simplifying here, but that's when they decided

what an epic looked like or an iambic poem or whatever. The Greek novel is the product of a later era and after they'd already decided what the labels were. So they didn't really have a term for the Greek novel in antiquity. So when people talk about Greek novels, they typically say use these sort of long periphrases like extended prose fiction work. So, yes, that's a very capacious category, obviously. And there is an awful lot of stuff like that that appears in the Roman Empire. But there's also a narrower group of five texts that we tend to call either the Greek romance or the ideal Greek novel, which are heterosexual love stories built around the two young people who fall in love at the beginning. They experience all

sorts of different tribulations depending on the nature of the novel, but they get it together at the end, which sounds like a very simple sort of Milton Boone-y, Harlequin-y kind of romance thing. But I think they're actually much more complex and sophisticated in terms of the content of that. Absolutely, because let's go into the content of these five extant pieces of literature that you just mentioned there, because I kind of want to go straight to your book idea that you mentioned in the title of your book, this idea of dirty love. What is this idea of dirty love, Tim? It's not what you think. So I borrowed the idea of dirt from Mary Douglas, who talks about the way in which dirt is a socially constructed

category. And it means that basically things are out of place in her vocabulary. So she points out that, for example, you know, a shoe on the foot is not dirty, but a shoe on the table is dirty. Food on a plate is not dirty, but food down your jacket is dirty. So dirt is matter out of place, according to Mary Douglas. And the central idea of that book that I was pushing was that the novels, because they are not only designed to travel as physical texts, but they contain within them stories of travel and miscegenation and mixing up of different peoples or whatever, they are centrally driven by this interest in combination and recombination of people. And that's the dirtiness. It's putting people out of place.

So I was arguing in this book that the love on which the Greek novels tend to focus is characterised by a sense of transgression, a sense of crossing of social boundaries. transgression, a sense of crossing of social boundaries. And I linked that to the fact that the novel itself is the product of a kind of mixed up, sort of hybridised world of the Roman Empire and to an extent the Hellenistic period as well. And it's not the old style Greek literary product, which is a text composed primarily for the Greek world and often just for one particular city in that Greek world. This is sort of messy, culturally mixed up material. But is it this messiness which actually is so crucial to why it seems that these stories were so popular in antiquity, Tim?

I'd like to think so, yeah. Clearly, being an academic and a nerd, I'm going to have to say it's a bit more complicated than that. And I think there are elements in the Greek novels of traditional, what you might call Hellenocentrism. Hellen is the Greek word for Greek, so it means Greek-centredness. Some of the novels begin in the Greek world, take their characters out into, you know, what the Greeks would call the barbarian world of the East. They don't like it very much there. They find it very traumatic. And then at the end, they return home to the Greek world. So whatever else is going on there, and of course, there's a lot else going on, there is a sort of Greek-centredness to a narrative like that. But if you

go to the other extreme, there's an extraordinary text. The latest of our Greek novels is Heliodorus' Cariclea and Theogenes, which is also a text that's really influential in Afrocentrism and in 19th century onwards ways of sort of trying to think about the way in which the classics as a field might not be white, as it were. This is a text which centres on two young lovers who, as the novel opens, they're found on the shore of northern Egypt, sort of the Mediterranean shore of Egypt, and they are perceived by some Egyptians to be white. But in the course of the novel, it's disclosed that one of them, the female character, is in fact the child of the Ethiopian royal family

and that her birth as a white girl was the result of, during the act of consummation, the act of impregnation, the mother was looking up at the ceiling where there was a painting of a white girl and that imprinted itself on the foetus. You know, as obviously sort of scientifically accurate kind of conception of things. Anyway, so the narrative of Heliodorus is all about really how a young couple who look white can turn out to be black. And I think that's sort of allegory for how the novel itself has sort of Greek-centred flavours to it and can be read in those terms. But also underneath, identity is something much more than skin deep it's actually something deeper and there are forms of identity that go beyond the superficial

or whatever absolutely and we've kind of mentioned it already but just want to get this really hammered nail on the head this idea and as i'm sure this is probably a term we'll come back to as this interview goes on, this idea in the Greek novel of cultural hybridisation. Yes, I think that is a central idea. I mean, you certainly get a lot of intermixing between people from different parts of the world because, as I say, by and large, this is a genre based on travel. There is one exception to this, which is a pastoral novel, which is set entirely in the world of Lesbos. But even there, they have a little bit of contact with people from outside.

But by and large, the dominant model here is, and this sort of goes back to Homer's Odyssey, really. It sort of borrows a lot from Homer's Odyssey and Odysseus' travels around the Mediterranean. It's about encounters with other people. Now, hybridisation implies something more than encounters, encounters can of course be hostile encounters, they can reinforce cultural boundaries. So hybridisation is ultimately a reproductive metaphor and that's where the Greek novels are particularly interesting I think because one version, the Helleno-centric, the Greek-centred version, is about how basically Greek and Greek must be, you know, united in order to produce more little Greek offspring or whatever.

But the novels don't necessarily focus on that paradigm. And Heliodorus, I just mentioned, is one example where that doesn't happen. Another is the most influential novel of antiquity, Achilles, Tatius, Leucippian, Clytefon. Leucippi is from Byzantium in the Greek world. Clytefon is from the Phoenician city of Tyre in modern Lebanon. I mean, actually, it happens that they're connected to each other by ancestral relationship. But that is a novel which is, again, about hybridization, about people meeting with and combining with people from different parts of the world. That hybridisation that literally happens in some novels is itself, I think, a metaphor for the combinatory world that produces the novels themselves. These are not

works that are products of some sort of indigenous Greekness. These are products of the very mobile migratory world of the Roman Empire. I mean, is it key, Tim, to this ancient novel, this idea of distance then in the love story that is so key to, I think it's like building up the desire and I guess the distances in the ancient world can reflect that to an extent. Desire is predicated on distance, isn't it? If desire is fulfilled, there's no desire. So you have to have a gap between X and Y in order for desire to occur. My coffee cup is on the table. If I had it in my hand, I wouldn't be desiring it. So I think that distance, I mean, clearly it can be a conceptual distance. And Caratentacalliroia, I mentioned earlier, the lovers initially are from the same city, but their parents are political rivals. So even though there's no geographical distance between them, there is that sort of political distance. It's a sort of Montague and Capulet kind of narrative at the beginning.

kind of narrative at the beginning. Sometimes there is a physical barrier. So in one mini-epic poem, actually, but very novelistic poem, Musaeus' Hero in Leander, which is a really famous story, which has a huge amount of impact on the modern world as well, including, I think, on David Bowie's song Heroes. We can come back to that if you like. But it's about lovers separated by the Hellespont, the band of water that separates European Asia from Asian Asia. So of course, that's a very symbolic boundary as well. So Leander swims on a nightly basis to go and see Hero, and they have sex in the tower together, and he swims back in the morning. But that physical boundary there is a sort of concretisation of the conceptual boundary that basically underpins all models of desire. And particularly in the Greek world, where the word pothos is, according to a fake etymology generated by Plato, at least, is rooted in the idea of absence. Go on then, before we go on to Calerori and focusing on that one, you mentioned the David

Bowie song Hero. So what is the story behind this? Well, the story behind it actually is that this is what one of these sort of thunderclap moments that happened to me. I was translating Musaeus' Hero and Leander in Berlin just before giving a paper in Berlin. And Musaeus' Hero and Leander is, as I say, it's the one where Leander swims across the Hellespont to meet his girlfriend. And there was just something in the back of my mind that I couldn't quite unlock. And I realised that it was to do with being in Berlin,

and Bowie's song Heroes is about the Berlin Wall as a separator between the two lovers there. And there were two things that twigged in my mind. One was the song title itself, Heroes, which is sort of inexplicable. I mean, I suppose there's something heroic about two young lovers separated by the Berlin Wall, but it's not obviously heroic.

I know there are other explanations for that title, but it seemed to me that Hero was probably a pointer in the direction of the female protagonist of Hero and Leander. And the other thing was that the second verse, in the second verse, the narrator imagined swimming like dolphins can swim. And of course, you can't literally swim across the Berlin Wall, as far as I know. So I think he's imagining himself as Leander swimming across the Berlin Wall. Hero and Leander was of hugely influential text in,

you know, Marlow did a version of it and there have been lots of paintings of it. So I don't think it's sort of entirely implausible, but it may be wrong. Absolutely. There you go. David Bowie and ancient literature. You never thought you'd hear that, but you've heard it right here first and foremost.

Moving on, Tim, then to the story of calero you mentioned it earlier and you mentioned how early you have these examples of physical boundaries between lovers but it sounds like from what you're saying with calero almost romeo and juliet's like you have this political boundary between the families yeah caritone's calero is possibly the earliest of our greek romances this particular, the heterosexual romance. I say possibly because there is a Jewish novel which may precede it. And that's a really interesting separate story. And we can come on to talk about that if you like.

But the Jewish novel is quite hard to date. And it might, in fact, be a Christian novel, which we'll put it later. But Caritons Caleroi is of the surviving novels, fully surviving novels, seems to be the earliest. And as you say, it's centred on this Romeo and Juliet style narrative of Kyrias and Caleroe coming from different political families in the town of Syracuse in Sicily. And it's set in the aftermath of the Athenian attempted invasion in the 5th century BCE, a story which is told by Thucydides in the Peloponnesian War. So it's a really interesting literary experiment in firstly revisiting historical events from half a millennium earlier, and secondly giving the other

sides perspective, because Thucydides' perspective is very much from the Athenian side. This is from the Sicilian side, the side of the people who are attacked. And of course, whilst there are all sorts of ways in which Keraton's narrative evokes aspects of Thucydides, it's a very different kind of narrative as well, because it's not about politics and it's not about military history. It's about the micro dynamics of a social interaction within a city that has recently been under siege. So it gives you, if you like, the sort of the insider story. It gives you the psychological dynamics within the city. That's fascinating from those points of view. It's also fascinating

in the sense that if you think of the basic romance template, which probably never exists in any pure form. It is girl meets boy, separation, reunion at the end. And that is a sort of, it's a morally straightforward story. The reasons for the separation are not of the young people's making. It's to do with love rivals and people being abducted by pirates and all that sort of thing. Carrot Hands Calleroy gives a much more complex story than that, and a much more disturbing story than that, because the disappointed suitors of Calleroy, the woman, start sowing discord, and they start fermenting jealousy in Kyrias's mind.

So they've got married at this stage. Kyrias and Calleroy have got married. And once Kyrias starts believing these stories and seeing the sort of fake evidence that's been planted, he flies into a rage and commits a horrific act of domestic violence against Kalerui and kicks her apparently to death. And she is then buried in a tomb, a rich, lavish tomb, which is tomb robbed.

And then the pirates who do the tomb robbing realise that she's still alive and realise that she, as a slave, would be more valuable than the belongings that have been left with her. So it's a really nasty story, actually, very sort of ugly story. And there's a recent discussion of it in terms of the psychology of domestic abuse and the ways in which this maps onto narratives of domestic abuse that seem to be cross-cultural. We're very used as classicists to think about things in the historical context, but there's more and more research being done these days in terms of sort of evolutionary psychological mechanisms and so forth. Now, you know, I don't

want to get into that. It's not my specialist area. But as I say, as a narrative about male possession, jealousy, and the tendency to violence, when one can't possess a woman on one's own, it is extraordinary text. But beyond that, it becomes very female centered. And we see the world from Kalarowi's point of view. And when she's sold to a rich man in Miletus in modern Turkey, She is forced to take a really difficult choice as to whether to remarry this man who's offering her a better life. She's pregnant at this time, she realises, by the first husband, or whether to stay true to the memory of Karyas, her first husband, and she chooses bigamy instead. So you can see that the moral complexities multiply in the course of this narrative. So while it is a Greek-centred narrative and it is about how one is happier in a

Greek world and that gives you the security or whatever, that Greek world is far from idealised. It is a world that really lays bare all of the tensions and anxieties and the unpleasantness behind a normative heterosexual relationship. Absolutely. The tale you just brilliantly explained there, Tim, it's very difficult to find, I mean, but it might just be my ignorance to think of a similar tale from that period in ancient history. Yeah, I mean, obviously, the Greeks weren't shy of talking about the ugly side of sexual relationships. And they were less, I was gonna say squeamish, that's the wrong word to use, but they were less, they had fewer reservations about male violence. whilst I think Caleroe is an extraordinary text in the sense that it does give us a female perspective on all of this, and perhaps not a female perspective as we would understand or we would expect it these days, but it is a female-centred narrative. I mean, there are stories, of course, of, I mean, going back to Greek tragedy and beyond,

of horrific abuses occurring within marriage and people behaving absolutely awfully. The Greek tragedians were very aware that marriage is far from, you know, an idyllic union of two people for happy ever after. And going on from Calerori a little bit, because we say it's the first of the extant Greek novels that survive, it was interesting what you were saying there. You said it's with the historical background of the Sicilian expedition from the other side of it. I'd just kind of like to compare it with other stories we have from another source, which I've seen mentioned in your book, which is a story from the Bible of Josephus and the wife of, get this right, Potiphar. Do we see any

similarities here, Tim? So this is the Jewish novel that I was talking about. Yeah, so a nice little bridge back. Yes, I keep on sort of, you know, dropping these little kind of seeds in and then they grow later, which is good. Fantastic. Yeah, so Joseph and Aseneth is one line in Genesis where the biblical patriarch Joseph is said to marry an Egyptian woman, Aseneth, and she is the daughter of someone called Potiphar in the Greek novel version of it. But that's not the same Potiphar as Potiphar who had the wife, but the fact that they share the same name is interesting. So just to fill in a little bit of background, of course Joseph ends up in Egypt where he has an advisory role to the pharaoh there. But an official's wife called Potiphar falls in love with him. He, being very virtuous, rebuts her. She makes up a story that he tried it on with her. He gets thrown into jail for a long

time. And then he uses his prophetic skills in jail to build up a bit of reputation. He's released and then recovers his position of trust in the pharaoh's court. So that's the sort of the background for this. And this novel is set a little bit later, where he's still somebody who is esteemed in the Egyptian world, but he also has this reputation hanging over him of, you know, is he, isn't he the one that seduced or attempted to seduce Potiphar's wife? So that's where the novel opens. And he's going to visit this other Potiphar, an Egyptian. And he walks in and Potiphar's daughter, this time, falls in love with him. And she gets very morally conflicted about this, as you would imagine,

because of all the stories floating around Joseph. Is he a seducer? Is he not? And all that sort of thing. So it's a different version of the biblical story, which basically says that absolutely no, you know, Joseph didn't have anything to do with Potiphar's wife. It was all from her point. Then the novel, as novels tend to do, sort of exposes all of the ambiguities and all this, yeah, well, you know, maybe there's no smoke without fire, all that kind of narrative. So she is, the young girl is very uncertain about it. But nevertheless, she's completely smitten. And she does the novelistic thing of going and lying on the bed and sort of weeping and saying, you know, what's wrong with me? What is this thing happening to me?

A lot of the romance is about this sort of trying to work out the mysteries of the psychological effects of love. Joseph, meanwhile, is somebody who clearly feels something for her, but the novel feels very cautious about attributing any kind of sexual desire to him. So he's sort of presented as somebody who's simultaneously in love, but also above being in love. But he has his own qualms here because he knows about Jewish interdictions on intermarriage. So the novel is really interesting the way it plays out, because from the start, Potiphar's daughter is described as somebody who is much more beautiful than the other Egyptians. In fact, she's so beautiful, she looked like a Jew and she looked just like. And then we get a list of Jewish women that she looked like. So we're almost being led to believe

from the beginning that even though she is Egyptian, she sort of could work as a Jew if you kind of, you know, squint at the novel enough. And there's a strange dance that Joseph does with the idea of kinship. And he keeps on sort of saying, you know, you're like a sister to me, which in an Egyptian context might be a very dodgy thing to say, because the Egyptians, of course, married their sisters sometimes. I may not be explaining it very well, but there's a sort of, there's a way in which at the crude level, this is a story of intermarriage, of dirty love. An Egyptian and a Jew, neither should be marrying the other, but nevertheless, they do fall in love. And that's the genesis of the romance.

And they're successful in this relationship. But the undercurrent there is all about the slipperiness of these categories. And the fact that in this novel, at least, identity, that's the Egyptian or Jewish identity, is seen as an extension of kinship. And that exposes all sorts of problems, because if you say you're not from another group, you're from my group, then that can easily slope into a form of incest of the kind that the Egyptians practiced. So it is unpicking a lot of the complexities of particularly Jewish conceptions of identity as extended kinship. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles.

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armchair and the never ending so arguably every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities subscribe to warfare from history hit wherever you get your podcasts join us on the front line of military history. It's quite interesting, Tim, therefore, how you see these similarities in this story with Caleroy and the whole, some of those key ideas that we mentioned right at the start of intermarriage and all that, how you also see it in this story. Yeah, many of the motifs are shared between Joseph of Nazareth and Caleroy. And this is where we'd love to be able to date the text because some people have put it in the second century BCE. And that would be amazing because it basically means that the Greek novel has its genesis in literally hybridised literature. This is Jewish literature written in Greek with a lot of echoes of the language of the Septuagint, the Jewish Bible in there. So a novel that is about

cultural hybridisation. And by the way, the Jewish-Egyptian thing is interesting as well, because this text was probably produced in Egypt, possibly in Alexandria in the Hellenistic era. So there's an easy slide between Egyptian and Greek, because the rulers of Alexandria are Greeks, but they model themselves after Egyptian pharaohs. So the hybridity of Joseph and Azaneth is at one level sort of historically, looking back to the biblical times, it's about Jewish and Egyptian. But in terms of the contemporary context, it's really about Jewish and Greco-Egyptian, let's put it like that. So it could be that the novel has its genesis in this kind of hybridity. But of course,

it may be a late antique text, maybe a late antique Christian text, in which case, it is picking up on the kinds of moves that people like Carrotone have made earlier on. So the dating really is pivotal there, as ever. But I do think that there is, and this is what my book Dosey Love was about, really, I think there's quite a lot of evidence that stories like this are told really quite early on in the Greek world. Stories of love between people, you know, sort of across boundaries. And crucially, the dirty love paradigm is about the positive ennobling effects of love across cultural boundaries. ennobling effects of love across cultural boundaries. It's not about slapping down people who dare to travel to other places and dare to fall in love with them. That's a narrative that comes up very strongly in the epic tradition with Helen of Troy, of course, who is a Greek

woman who is taken off, whether willingly or unwillingly, by Paris to Troy, and therefore the Greeks have to go and get her back. Before just going on to that, just quickly, Tim, keeping on Alexandria, we will go back to Alexandria a bit later, but it is interesting how it seems to play this important role. And you mentioned the Jewish connection to Alexandria, particularly the Ptolemaic Alexandria, because we do know, I believe there is this big Jewish sector of Hellenistic Alexandria. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. I mean, Alexandria was a multicultural city. That's a bit of a cliche. But I mean, it did have a Jewish zone, it had a Greek zone, it had a native Egyptian zone, it had different tax brackets for different ethnic

communities. So it was a place that was very aware of being home to multiple different communities with different needs and inevitably different positions on the hierarchy, which was constructed by the Greco-Macedonian elite. of Jewish thought and Jewish literature, because they were producing Jewish literature in Greek, using the scripture that was notionally God's word, and was kind of written in a largely in Hebrew, but obviously a bit of Aramaic in there as well. So the whole problem of translation into the Greek language is one that is very tense and anxious for Jews, not just in Alexandria itself, but also in Judea, in the historical lands of Israel, because people over there are clearly anxious about the fact that Greek Judaism is taking off. The best example of this is a text called Ben Sira, which is composed in the late second century BCE. And it's originally composed in Aramaic, but what we have is the Greek translation of it with a little preface at the beginning, which essentially says,

you know, I'm sending this Greek translation to you guys, apparently in Alexandria, so that you can have some, you know, some good old Jewish law, L-O-I-E, and some advice and some sort of morally kind of ennobling stuff. But you should be aware that reading it in Greek isn't as good as reading it in the original. The words don't have the same power in Greek as they do in the original. Nevertheless, from the Alexandrian Jewish perspective, there's an extraordinary vibrant culture there. And we can see this in, we have large parts of a Greek tragedy written around the Exodus story, the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt.

And again, it's pharaonic Egypt, but kind of by implication, it's also Ptolemaic Egypt. And we have fragments of epic poems written again in the Greek style, but on Jewish themes. So clearly there were Jews in Alexandria and Egypt generally that were exploring the opportunities of living in a hybridised world. Going back then to this idea of travelling across cultures, of daring to love, we've talked a bit further about looking at the Hellenistic period, perhaps 2nd century BC. I'd like to go a bit further back in time to another very interesting figure, which I know you talk a lot about, Ctesias. Tim, who was Ctesias? Ctesias was writing, well, he was active in the late 5th century BCE, so the era that we call the classical period. He is from Cnidos, which is in southern western Turkey. And he is one of the first Greeks that we could confidently label

bicultural. Whenever you say something like that, you know that a million people are going to write in and say, no, he wasn't. Of course, there were other people who could be labeled bicultural. But he's a very interesting example, let's put it in that way, a very interesting example of somebody who could be labeled bicultural relatively early on, so before the Hellenistic era. Now, what we know about Ctesias is largely reported by later people, but Xenophon, the Athenian general and writer, talks about him, talks about Ctesias being on the other side in one of the battles that is fought between Xenophons. So Xenophon is supporting the claim on the Persian throne of Cyrus the Younger. He's leading a mercenary army. And Cyrus is on the side of the incumbent on the other side, Artaxerxes. Xenophon describes seeing Ctesias on the battlefield

administering help as a doctor, I should say. So Ctesias is operating in a Persian context, and he claims, according to later reports, to have access to Persian royal archives. So he writes this extraordinary text called the Pesachar, which is one of the texts that is lost now. We only have little bits of it and summaries and later writer, but it would be amazing to have it. But it does seem to have been, I mean, at least purported to have been the true story of Persian history told using Persian archival material, but written in Greek. And it's written as a corrective to people like Herodotus in particular, who he called a liar. So it's a different version of, for example, the story of Cyrus the Elder. Herodotus has the standard version, if you like. Ctesias gives us

a different version of that. And in the midst of this story, there's a famous love story across the boundaries, the story of Zeranea and Stryongaeus. Zeranea is a female leader and a great warrior. And she captures Stryongaeus and the two of them fall in love and eventually Zarinere decides that she doesn't want to pursue this relationship and so she sort of rebuffs him and we have a suicide letter from Stryonga saying you know I can't live without you baby all that sort of stuff which extraordinarily is the earliest example of many of the tropes that appear in the romance. So if we had the full version of this story of Zeronea and Stryon Gaius, I suspect we would see not a complete version of what later turns into the Greek romance

as canonised by Caritone in the first century BCE, but certainly many of the moves in that direction. That's very interesting because it could be, and as you say, Tim, it's not clear, this could be an influence on it. And it's just striking. So one of these figures is a Mede, and the other person is a Parthian. So Stryonges is a Mede, but Zerunnaia is a Scythian, I think. Ah, okay. So yeah, and the Scythians are, at least from the Greek perspective, you know, very other,

because they are the nomadic people in the steppes north of Iran. And they're sort of associated with the world of the Amazons and that sort of thing in the Greek mythical imagination. Now, Ctesias, of course, is trying to tell, you know, a truer story, which is more localised in that region. So he doesn't do all of the kind of stereotypical othering stuff here. And he's, as far as we can tell, ennobling these figures and saying, you know, these are great warriors, these are sort of people who are interesting in their own right. But it is, yes, precisely, it's a story of love across cultural boundaries, and not just cultural, but also military boundaries here. I mean, this is, in a sense, it's a version, it's a sort of ancient Near Eastern version

of the story of Achilles and Penthesilea, which is the epic story of Achilles. So after the end of Homer's Iliad, the next episode is where the Amazons come, led by Queen Penthesilea. This, of course, is in the background to the Wonder Woman story. So, you know, there's a bit of modern reception there as well. But Penthesilea is the, of course, is in the background to the Wonder Woman story. So, you know, there's a

bit of modern reception there as well. But Penthesilea is the queen of the Amazons and Achilles defeats her. But according to some versions, falls in love with her at the moment where he's about to kill her, but it's a bit too late and runs her through with his sword. So the idea of kind of love on the battlefield, love crossing those boundaries or whatever, is an epic motif. But Ctesias has changed it around and turned it into this sort of dirty love motif, where it becomes not just a sort of story of the superiority of one side over the other, the dominance of male over female, the superiority of military valour over desire. This is a story in which desire actually becomes the

energising force. And in fact, actually, after the Stryongaes episode, Zarinere seems to broker a peace across a number of different cultural boundaries. So it's, you know, you might say that if we had the full version of Ctesias' narrative, it might be that this erotic episode actually has political impact in its own right, because it shows her that friendship and indeed desire can operate productively across cultural boundaries. And keeping on this, Tim, I'd just like to go even further east because I know there's another example that is mentioned from India too, which could possibly also be linked. Yes. So this is a story preserved by a sort of a mediated version in a third century AD source of a story by Carys of Mytilene of two young lovers who, and again, it's set in the same part of the world in the sort of the borderlands between Persia and that area just to the north that was occupied by the Scythians. And it's a story, again, of love across between different ethnic groups who are at war, and in

this case separated by a river. So you've got that geographical boundary literalising the idea of distance once again. And in Kari's story, the two lovers fall in love. They meet in a dream, which is a bit wacky. Romantic tradition, like other aspects of the Greek tradition, tends towards the rationalistic. You know, people don't do things like this. But in Kari's version of it, which Kari tells us, Kari, as mediated by this third century AD source, tells us is kind of incredibly popular. It's a genuine Persian myth. tells us is kind of incredibly popular. It's a genuine Persian myth.

And we're told that, you know, Persians have this on, you know, paintings of this on their walls and they all tell the story. But yeah, it's about this young couple who fall in love in their dreams. And there's something very evocative about that. The way that as the story is told, the forces of social order

all conspire against the young lovers. But the world of dreams and imagination is the point of connection between the two. And what happens is that in the end, they meet and then they elope and they run away. And again, it's a sort of positive, happy ending story, really about the triumph of youthful, erotic energy over the normative forces of society that seek to constrain it. And the story that you're talking about is, again, very difficult to date, and possibly later. But it's an Indian story, which has many of the same motifs, including meeting in a dream, this very distinctive motif. But also, crucially, some of the names seem to be very similar to the extent that it's likely that one is a transposition of the other.

So how you put all this together, I don't know, because as I say, dating is very difficult in the Indian story. It's possible that Kari's Greek version of the story travelled to India in the Hellenistic era because, of course, Alexander did get as far as northern India. in the Hellenistic era, because of course Alexander did get as far as northern India. It's possible that the Persian version on which Kharis' version was modelled, if there was such a Persian version, Kharis may have invented it completely, but if there was a Persian version, that that too was shared with India, because I mean we know that there were contacts between the Persian court and Indians. I think the best way or the best thing to summarise from this is not that the lines of transition of stories like this can be laid out in a very linear way so that we can say that this influenced this, that influenced this or whatever, and that

we can draw a very clear map with points of connection between them, but that the very act of hybridisation that is narrated in these stories is enacted in the transmission of these stories. It's probably not a single answer, it's probably not the story went from here to here to here to here or whatever. It's a story of a kind of messy mixture with lots of different elements in it. Now, absolutely, Tim, it really feels like it's not a saying it originated here, then it went here and here. But instead, we've talked about examples varying from Kaliroi in the Central Mediterranean, to the Jewish, it mentioned in Genesis, the Bible, to Ctesias, to India, a huge geographic area. And of course, the dates, we're not completely sure. But it is really interesting how you see these

motifs, similar motifs that you can compare between them. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there are broadly, I suppose, sort of three models for how stories circulate. There is the linear one, which is a story starts somewhere, and you can trace its influence through time. And that's the traditional story of Greek literary culture. We talk about everything originating from Homer, and then, you know, you go down into the world of tragedy, and they sort of retell these stories in different ways. And then because of the canonical influence of Homer and subsequent post-Homeric traditions, and because of the strength and the normativity of the Greek educational tradition, you actually get a

tradition that looks like it begins at one point and never really ends, but, you know, continues continuously up to the modern day, arguably. Another version of that is this of the polygenesis version, which is, you know, we're back into the world of, you know, of things like, you know, the invention of the plowshare, for example, is it invented in one place and then passed down as a technology or is it invented simultaneously in lots of places? Now, it's clear that from our folklorists that there are lots of stories with similar motifs that appear all over the world and the human brain has a certain amount of consistency across space and time which means

that it generates similar kinds of stories. Those are the two extremes. I think the dirty love model that I'm pushing is somewhere in between the two, because we're not zooming out so far as the folklorist version where you can linear, you know, very rigid transmission through a sort of hermetically sealed cultural tradition. In particular, I think the world of empire, the world of Hellenistic and Roman imperial empire gives us a sort of a messier world. And it's back to what I said at the beginning about, you know, the world of migration, of textual transmission, of the way in which things that originate in one place can very quickly end up, things and people, I should say, that originate in one place can very quickly end up in another place. So that's really the model that I was trying to push in Dirty Love. And just before we finish, there was something also which seems really interesting. If we go

to those five extant Greek plays that we were talking about nearer the start, is being able to recognise them as an ancient novel by their titling. Yeah, so this is a hobby horse of mine. As I mentioned at the beginning, there's an awful lot of novelistic material that appears, or that we have from the period of the Roman Empire. I should say that there's an awful lot of literature, Greek literature from the Roman Empire. I should say that there's an awful lot of literature, of Greek literature from the Roman Empire. There's huge amounts more. I mean, even the author Galen wrote more than survives from the classical and Hellenistic period, pretty much.

I'm making that up, but I'm sure that's right, actually. So one author from the Roman Imperial period has more textual material preserved than all of everything that goes beforehand. As I say, don't quote me on that, but I think that is true. So I say, don't quote me on that. But I think that is true. So we have an awful lot of novelistic material from the Greek, from the Roman imperial period.

We have these five texts that look pretty similar to each other in terms of the motifs and terms of the themes that come, although they're very varied as well. People used to say, is this a genre? And they used to have a very sort of inflexible wooden concept of genre that said, a literary genre has to have the following criteria, like a recipe list, and you take them off, whatever. And then another wave

of scholars came along and said, well, no, actually, you know, that doesn't work. Genre doesn't work like that. And in fact, actually, we're in a world of much more generic fluidity. There is no name for this genre. There are elements that these texts have in common with other novelistic texts and other kinds of literary production or rhetorical speeches, for example, from this era. So therefore there is no novel genre as such. My position is that genre is a fluid thing. And, you know, if you think about a film like Star Wars, it clearly it's sci-fi, but it has elements of Kung Fu movie in it, elements of cowboy movie and Han Solo and so forth, and elements of romance in it. So genres do, we know that they operate in messy ways and they generate

their energy from, you know, sort of cross fertilization with other literary genres. Nevertheless, you know, you need a generic framework in order to make sense of a text, particularly a narrative text, because you need to know what the expectations of this text are, particularly when those expectations aren't met or they're flouted in one way. Yes, I wrote an article in 2005, I think probably the nerdiest thing I've ever done, which is collecting all the evidence for the title conventions of the Greek romances. And I think I showed that there is a consistent titling feature, and they're all basically called the story of, and then the girl's name, sometimes with the boy's name as well, and sometimes with a further description.

But it's the story of the girl's name that is the crucial generic marker of this particular type of material. So that was my attempt to try and show that these five romances do occupy a genre and that people when they came across them would have known where on the mental map of literary forms to place them i think it therefore also tells everyone something about me that i actually enjoyed that as bedtime reading last night so uh that article so um so thanks that tim um quickly before we finish uh you planted one other seed, I think, really, as we were chatting, because you've mentioned a couple of times about the epic Greek stories and, for instance, of the Trojan War. And we see this, correct me if I'm saying this, but we see this story in resistance to the dirty love motif. Yes, either that or the other way around. The idea that I floated in the book was that, and the epic people will hate me for this, but was that part of the reason why the Trojan War narrative becomes the big story in the archaic period and the Greeks embrace it as their, I don't want to say national story because there's no nation, but you know, the story of the Greek people has to do with the fact that in the 8th and 7th centuries, when these stories are achieving their canonical centrality, you've actually got a world of radical hybridity, because this is the period when the Greeks are really getting to grips with pan-Mediterranean

ship travel. And they're trading like the Phoenicians, you know, going east to west or whatever. So they're coming and they're setting up colonies all over the mediterranean so they're coming into contact with new peoples the whole time and this sort of fluidity creates a newtonian counter-reaction which is to do with the construction of peninsula identity the greek peninsula itself becomes the place where they locate home and that's the story of the odyssey at one level is you know i've got to get home, I've got to get back to the Greek peninsula, or indeed an island just off the Greek peninsula. So yeah, so I was floating the idea that the epics, part of what they're doing is constructing a narrative of Greek exceptionalism, the idea that the Greek peninsula has something very special about it, and in particular that reproduction is best done between inhabitants of that peninsula. So Odysseus has got to get home.

He can't stay abroad sowing his seeds with Circe or Calypso, although he does a bit of that, but he doesn't produce children. He certainly can't marry Nausicaa. He's got to get back to Penelope. And similarly, the Iliad is about, we've got to get Helen back from Troy because she has got to reproduce with Menelaus. Now, there are other versions of the early Greek epic tradition that tell a different story. So Jason and Medea, for example, Medea comes from Colchis and she goes back to the Greek world. It's not a story with a particularly happy ending, of course, but you know, that is a story of cultural hybridisation. But that doesn't become the dominant narrative. The Trojan War narrative becomes the dominant one, partly as I say, because I think Greeks are trying to organise a sense of themselves as a cohesive people by geography, but also by reproductive policing. So the dirty

love narrative that I was trying to tell in the book is, I argue, a sort of an acknowledgement of the reality that identities tend to be more messy and people combine in unpredictable forms, but also particularly a literary form of talking back to that dominant epic narrative, which tends to be so Greekreek-centred absolutely and it kind of feels more real doesn't it yeah i hope so no absolutely tim that was a fantastic chat one last time your book on this is called it's called dirty love and it has a subtitle but i can't remember it now uh tim thanks so much for coming on the show this is great great well really good to talk

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