Fantasy in Greek and Roman Literature

Graham Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367139902
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429639173
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Fantasy in Greek and Roman Literature offers an overview of Greek and Roman excursions into fantasy, including imaginary voyages, dream-worlds, talking animals and similar impossibilities. This is a territory seldom explored and extends to rarely read texts such as the Aesop Romance, The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice, and The Pumpkinification of the Emperor Claudius.

Bringing this diverse material together for the first time, Anderson widens readers' perspectives on the realm of fantasy in ancient literature, including topics such as dialogues with the dead, Utopian communities and fantastic feasts. Going beyond the more familiar world of myth, his examples range from The Golden Ass to the Late Antique Testament of a Pig. The volume also explores ancient resistance to the world of make-believe.

Fantasy in Greek and Roman Literature is an invaluable resource not only for students of classical and comparative literature, but also for modern writers on fantasy who want to explore the genre's origins in antiquity, both in the more obvious and in lesser-known texts.

1 Introduction

What is fantasy? And where should we look for it in the literature of Greece and Rome? How universal is the climate of disapproval of it? Do writers manage to get away with it under some other guise? Do some literary genres accommodate it more comfortably than others? These are the kinds of questions we can hope to raise about an area of ancient literature still all too rarely explored as such, and the prospect of finding answers will vary considerably.

Towards a definition

The term fantasy can be applied to any material that is felt to be impossible (or nearly so), in contrast to the normal workings of the real world. ¹ This is consistent with a well-established meaning of the term phantasia in Antiquity itself, where it can be applied to the forming of concepts in the mind, hence ‘imaginary’ and often far-fetchedly so; there is a tendency to associate fantasy with the wilder reaches of the imagination, but its usage is conveniently flexible.

A number of categories overlap with fantasy without actually coinciding with it: fantasy can find room for such concepts as the miraculous, the absurd, the grotesque or the uncanny, and others can be readily added. ² Fantasy in Antiquity need not constitute a genre as such, though it may find itself allied to one, as in the case of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass), which is readily described as a fantasy novel and incorporates all the elements from the miraculous to the uncanny suggested above. Again, fantasy is an essential ingredient in myth or fairy tale, without coinciding completely with either or demanding definition of each in turn.

Moreover, it should be emphasised that practitioners of fantasy may not feel bound by any theoretical definitions at all. Neither Homer nor Aristophanes needed to work within theoretical guidelines, rather than relying on simple opportunism or whim. Hence it will be worthwhile to keep the boundaries of fantasy flexible, rather than devise definitions designed to limit its operations.

Imagining the gods, or a three-headed man

As it happens, we do have an exotic setting in which one of our most explicit discussions of phantasia itself takes place: the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana is discussing the portrayal of the gods with Ethiopian sages: ³

‘Your Phidiases’, said (the gymnosophist) Thespesion, ‘and Praxiteleis went up to heaven and copied the shapes of the gods and worked them by their art; or was there something else, which drove them to do their moulding?’ ‘There was indeed something else’ replied Apollonius’, ‘and it was replete with wisdom’. ‘What’, asked Thespesion, ‘for what could you say other than imitation?’ ‘Imagination’ (phantasia), said Apollonius, ‘wrought these, a craftsman more cunning than imitation. For imitation will fashion what it knows, whereas imagination will create what it does not know; for it will suppose with reference to reality, and terror will often deter imitation, where nothing can deter imagination, for it proceeds undismayed toward the goal it has set for itself. And it is necessary when you imagine the form of Zeus to see him with the heavens and seasons and stars, just as Phidias did once upon a time, and to fashion Athena conceiving camps and cunning and crafts, and how she leapt from the head of Zeus. But if you fashion a hawk or an owl or a wolf or a dog, and put them in temples in place of Hermes and Athena and Apollo, your wild beasts and birds will seem praiseworthy as likenesses, but the gods will lose a great deal of their dignity’.

Here then is phantasia used to denote ‘imaginative conception’: the human capacity for forming realistic and plausible conceptions in the mind corresponding to the realities outside. As Longinus put it: ‘when inspired by passionate enthusiasm, you seem to see what you put before the very eyes of the audience’. ⁴ But such material may also be banal and routine rather than strikingly imaginative. Here is a good example from Lucian of a useful distinction: ⁵

If one of those daring poets told you there was once a man with three heads and six hands, and if in the first instance you were to accept this without question, and you believed it without asking if it were possible, he would at once fill in the rest of the details, that he had six eyes and six ears and three voices and ate food through three mouths and had thirty fingers, not like each one of us only ten on both hands. And if he had to fight a war, each of the three hands would hold a shield—be it light, oblong or round—and three would hold an axe, throw a spear, or use a sword; and who would disbelieve someone saying all this, for it would follow on from the start at which it was necessary to examine whether it could be accepted and agreed?

In this instance, the invention of the three initial heads and six hands would be an example of fantasy, of bold invention, while the filled-in details of everything else that followed would correspond merely to the most banal quarter of imagination.

Some examples from Longinus

The testimony of Longinus is particularly illuminating in the no-man’s land between imagination and fantasy. For him also, phantasia amounts to a kind of ability to perceive what is unseen—imagination, as we should term it; but in fact, the examples he gives, for the most part, coincide with what we should regard as fantasy, tending to push the boundaries of imagination to their limits. He begins with two examples of poets presenting Orestes inflicted by the Furies. First, Euripides’ Orestes:

Mother, I pray you, do not drive at me the bloody faces of these snake-like women! Look there, look there, they are leaping right onto me. ⁶

We also find the description of Phaethon being taught to ride:

When he heard this, Phaethon seized the reins, struck the flanks of his winged team and let them go, while they flew towards the vales of the air. His father behind him, mounted on the dog-star’s back, instructed his son: ‘drive there, turning your car now in this direction, now in that …’ ⁷

Longinus has no lack of other examples on offer: for him, Aeschylus and Euripides both envisage Lycurgus’ palace itself as seized by a Bacchic frenzy, and Achilles appears above his own tomb. Longinus comments on the element of romantic exaggeration and the exceeding of the bounds of credibility; this is the practice of poetry, whereas the orators are bound by a greater degree of restraint, although those of his own day have reverted to the devices of tragedy: ‘But our clever orators these days, like the tragedians, see Furies, and fools that they are cannot grasp that when Orestes says “Let go of me …” he is only imagining this because he is mad’. ⁸

Fantasy or mouse-epic?

So much then for a preliminary look at terms, which we shall find ourselves revisiting from time to time. But let us begin our own exploration with an illustration of what we can all agree is a fantastic situation: a single combat is in progress between a weasel and a mouse whose name is Trixos (‘Squeaky’), ‘best mong the mice’: ⁹

But his ancestral soil did not receive him back again,

For first a weasel took him by the middle and gobbled him up,

And his wife was left at home, her two cheeks torn,

In the nibbling-chamber where she knew many nibblings.

When the messenger has reported the news to her, Hermes leaves the feasting on Olympus and makes his way to the place where the figs are laid out to dry; an assembly of mice takes place, to the dismay of the weasel. The papyrus ends with the speech of a revered mouse, who had foreknowledge from his father of the dire event.

We might have no difficulty in acknowledging that such an episode is fantastic in conception, but where do we go from there? Not necessarily into a study of ‘the fantastic in antiquity’, but rather into a trail of critical enquiries that will help us somehow to explain the fantastic elements away. We shall of course want to relate such a piece to the fully extant Batrachomuiomachia, the ‘Battle of the Frogs and the Mice’, and hence into some sub-departme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Themes of fantasy
• PART II Divergent imaginations
• PART III Fantastic texts
• PART IV Consumers of fantasy
• Appendix: some fantastic nonsense
• Bibliography
• Index