Dirty Love

The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel

Tim Whitmarsh

Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture

A new account of the emergence of the Greek novel
Expands our understanding of the relationship between Greek and near-eastern literatures
Provides insights into the novel form not just for Classicists but for all students and readers of the genre

Dirty Love

The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel

Tim Whitmarsh

Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture

Description

Where does the Greek novel come from? This book argues that whereas much of Greek literature was committed to a form of cultural purism, presenting itself as part of a continuous tradition reaching back to founding fathers within the tradition, the novel revelled in cultural hybridity. The earliest Greek novelistic literature combined Greek and non-Greek traditions (or at least affected to combine them: it is often hard to tell how 'authentic' the non-Greek material is). More than this, however, it also often self-consciously explored its own hybridity by focusing on stories of cultural hybridisation, or what we would now call 'mixed-race' relations. This book is thus not a conventional account of the origins of the Greek novel: it is not an attempt to pinpoint the moment of invention, and to trace its subsequent development in a straight line. Rather, it makes a virtue of the murkiness, or 'dirtiness', of the origins of the novel: there is no single point of creation, no pure tradition, only transgression, transformation and mess. The novel thus emerges as an outlier within the Greek literary corpus: a form of literature written in Greek, but not always committing to Greek cultural identity. Dirty Love focuses particularly on the relationship between Persian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek literature, and covers such texts as Ctesias' Persica, Joseph and Aseneth, the Alexander Romance and the tale of Ninus and Semiramis. It will appeal to those interested not only in Greek literary history, but also in near-eastern and biblical literature.

Dirty Love

The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel

Tim Whitmarsh

Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture

Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
Prelude
First movement: Hellenism and hybridity
1. Dirty love
2. A history of the novel
3. What is a novel?
4. Epic and novel
5. Sourcing Callirhoe
Second movement: Persians
6. The romance of Zarinaea and Stryangaeus
7. Who was Ctesias?
8. Persian love stories
9. Media studies
10. Cyrus' sex life
Third movement: Jews
11. Return to Joseph
12. The Jewish novel
13. Joseph in love
Fourth movement: Egyptians
14. The long Hellenistic
15. Alexander in kohl
16. Whose paradigm?
Fifth movement: How Greek is the Greek romance?
17. How Greek is the Greek romance?
18. Romancing Semiramis
19. Dirty love in late antiquity
20. Conclusion: the foundation of Marseilles, some brooch-pins, and the history of the novel

Dirty Love

The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel

Tim Whitmarsh

Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture

Author Information

Tim Whitmarsh, E.P. Warren Praelector and Tutorial Fellow in Greek, Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Tim Whitmarsh is the second A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He also holds honorary roles at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the Universities of Pretoria and Exeter. He is the author of 7 books, including most recently Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, which has been translated into Dutch and (soon to appear) Chinese and Greek. He has written over 70 academic articles on ancient Greece, and appears regularly in newspapers such as The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, and on BBC radio and TV.

Dirty Love

The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel

Tim Whitmarsh

Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture

Reviews and Awards

"Destabilizing the still-common assumption that novels "originated," in any meaningful sense, among Greeks, Dirty Love will be a helpful addition to individual and institutional libraries featuring studies on literature and culture in the ancient world." - Michael Kochenash, Yuelu Academy, Hunan University, Religious Studies Review

"An enormously stimulating journey through a wide range of texts, relative to the environment out of which the Greek novel emerged. The stress laid throughout on the novel's willingness, even eagerness, to cross cultural boundaries carries conviction regardless of whether the arguments of individual chapters stand or fall. Dirty Love should be required reading for any future course in the Greek novel, and for anyone who wishes to dip further into one of the topics that it touches on, the rich footnotes on every page attest to the depth of scholarship throughout." - Sara R. Johnson, Phoenix

"Whitmarsh's argument is bold and original, and part of a larger endeavor, he says, to revise our understanding of classical Greek literature by locating it in a wider horizon in which Greekness itself is interrogated. In sum, this is a rich and stimulating book." - Bryn Mawr Classical Review

"If you have some interest in the origins of the novel, the classical world or the roots of Western civilisation, youll enjoy this. I felt cleverer after reading it." - Tibor Fischer, Standpoint