phrasis 51,1 (2010)_hodkinson (2)

11phrasis vol. 2010 (1)

Some Distinguishing Features of Deliberate Fictionality

in Greek Biographical Narratives

OWEN HODKINSON

DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS, UNIVERSITY OF WALES LAMPETER

Telling Li(v)es: The Overlap of Biography and Fiction

Even among modern works, there is a greater potential overlap between fic-tion and biography than between fiction and other historiographical forms.This is because to tell a life (if it is attempted as fully as possible) is to tell ofand speculate on private moments and inner thoughts, in a manner and to anextent which is less important and not essential to many other kinds of his-torical narrative. These private events are far less accessible to the historian,and more leeway for speculation is accorded to even the most serious modernbiography than to the history book. It is for this reason that the fictionality ofbiographical texts is not simply of interest to scholars interested in biographyancient or modern, but is in fact of crucial importance to those interested indefinitions and defining features of fiction itself, since it is on the borderlinebetween different kinds of narrative.1

For ancient biography and fiction, this importance is all the more evident:for it is well known that the extent to which a fully-formed or clear conceptof ‘fiction’ existed in Antiquity – in the absence of a word or definition (inGreek or Latin) which corresponds to our own term or means exclusivelysomething like ‘fiction’ – is a complex and ongoing debate.2 The absence of aclear concept or definition means that we must look for instances of metafic-tion, that is points at which a text displays self-consciousness about its ownstatus as fiction, in order to show that fictions are deliberate rather thanexamples of ‘bad historiography’, ‘bad biography’, or ‘forgeries’/‘pseudepi-

1 As Cohn recognises (1999: 18-37, 79-95). For ancient biography Momigliano (1971: 56) agrees: “theborderline between fiction and reality was thinner in biography than in ordinary historiography”.

2 Plasma is the closest: see e.g. Bowersock (1994: 1-27); Gill & Wiseman (1993); Morgan & Repath(forthcoming).

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grapha’ (in the case of e.g. autobiographical works and letters attributed tohistorical figures), and that at least some ancient authors and readers hadsome fairly clear notions of what constituted fiction and what modes of dis-course and conventions were appropriate to it as distinct from other forms ofwriting.

In ancient as in modern biography, we have a borderline case: while thereare several ancient texts which everyone accepts as deliberate fictions on theone hand3, and many more which everyone accepts as ‘serious’ history orbiography by intentionality on the other4, many and perhaps the majority of‘biographical’ texts or bioi from Greek Antiquity stand somewhere inbetween these poles: are they supposed to be read as historical accounts(their falsehoods and impossibilities put down to differing standards andmethods from those of modern historians or to being examples of bad his-tory by the standards of the day), as fabrications to deceive contemporaryreaders, as ‘popular’ biographies mythologising or fictionalising their sub-jects deliberately for a particular readership5, or as deliberate (even self-con-scious) fictions intended to be recognised as such by readers? The detectionof modes of discourse peculiarly appropriate to fiction, and of distinctions inthe practices of different authors in employing these or not, may be one, orin some cases the only, method available for deciding such questions aboutancient biography especially. If distinctions in authorial practices can beestablished, the presence of fiction-specific modes of discourse in certaintexts may in fact be taken as metafictional indicators which the intended,educated audience would have recognised and used in deciding to read thetext as a deliberate fiction (i.e. to approach it as they would the novels ofLongus or Heliodorus).

Defining Fiction by Form not Content

While this may seem all very well in theory, it might not be possible in prac-tice to determine the existence of such a clear distinction in the conventions

3 The ancient novels, containing very clear instances of metafiction and many other indicators besides.4 Herodotus, Thucydides, and so on for history; primarily Plutarch for biography; though differing

standards of historiographical responsibility might redefine some of these today as other than histori-cal, intentionality is important here. I am not of the school which avoids reference to authorial intent,as will have been gathered; in fact it is impossible to talk of or define fiction and still less metafictionwithout reference (even if implicit) to authorial intent.

5 See Hansen (1998: xvii-xxiii) for an excellent discussion of the applicability of the idea of ‘popularliterature’ to ancient Greece.

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DISTINGUISHING FEATURES OF DELIBERATE FICTIONALITY IN GREEK BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVES

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in fiction and non-fictional forms of writing (i.e. broadly linguistic, not con-tent-based features) in Antiquity.6 Cohn provides excellent discussion andexamples of this distinction in modern writing7, e.g. in the use of tenses:

‘Now was his last chance to see her; his plane left tomorrow.’ […] ina novel [… such] sentences strike as as perfectly logical – or better,they don’t strike us at all. (1999: 24-5)

By contrast, such a sentence in a serious, historical biography would beincongruous, although a fictionalising biography/biographical fiction (how-ever one chooses to label the biographical equivalent of a historical novel)might well employ this form of writing. The example sentence breaks a(modern, at least) convention of serious historical writing in employing inter-nal focalisation, as the Genette school of narratology and many others wouldanalyse it: the biographer employing it would be slipping surreptitiously intothe mind of the subject to narrate events from his perspective, thus allowingher/himself the luxury of omniscient and even psychically omniscient narra-tion. Serious biographers can legitimately permit themselves to speculate ontheir subjects’ thoughts and to narrate private events, of course, but the formin which they do so is different: they use phrases such as ‘must have done’, or‘perhaps did’ to indicate their speculations, and employ the simple past ‘hethought/felt’ only when they can adduce documentary evidence to supportsuch assertions.8 Internal focalisation and the narration of private events areof course to be found aplenty in ancient Greek texts of many kinds, but the

6 Indeed, Cohn (1999) in proposing this as defining fiction goes against many established theorists whohold that fictionality resides entirely in the content and/or intentionality, or elsewhere, but cruciallynever in the form of words; see e.g. Searle (1975: 327): “The utterance acts in fiction are indistin-guishable from the utterance acts of serious discourse [… so that] no textual property […] will iden-tify a stretch of discourse as a work of fiction.” In the face of Cohn’s arguments and examples (ibid.:18-37, 79-95, 109-31), however, a strong counter-argument indeed would be needed for the Searleposition to seem at all convincing.

7 Cohn (1999); i.e. writing in English and other modern languages, though examples in her book are inEnglish whether original or translation.

8 Cohn (1999: 27). Additional arguments for the position outlined in this paragraph are to be foundin Cohn (1999: 109-31); e.g. related factors in the case for thinking there is a difference in kind ofdiscursive mode between fiction and history are that “[history] draws on a language of nescience, ofspeculation, conjecture, and induction (based on referential documentation) that is virtuallyunknown in fictional scenes of novels (including historical novels) cast in third-person form” (ibid.:122), and that “fictional narratives demand, historical narratives preclude, a distinction betweenthe narrator and the implied author” (ibid.: 124, quoting Hernadi 1976: 252; see Genette 1993:72-9). These seem to me at least broadly applicable to ancient Greek texts as much as modernwriting, though the Greek historiographers (including the ‘historical’ biographer Plutarch) employa far smaller proportion of admissions of nescience and speculation etc. than their modern counter-parts.


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peculiar use of tenses to signpost the one is not, and the tell-tale conventionalmarkers for speculation may not have their equivalents either. In short, it maynot be possible to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction by linguisticfeatures at all in ancient Greek. But why should it be possible to do so, andwhy would it be desirable?

Intuitive definitions of ‘fiction’ tend to refer to the truth-value of the(propositional content of a) text rather than to its linguistic features or any-thing else. But this only works if ‘fiction’ = ‘untruth’ or ‘lie’, not for ‘fiction’ asliterary text, since all texts, fictional or not, can contain through design anderror both truths and untruths as well as things not subject to this distinction,such as hypothetical propositions. To distinguish fictions among literarytexts, other factors must come into play, and these may be linguistic, as in theexamples from Cohn above. A more important decisive factor, however, isauthorial intention: a work of historiography or text-book which containsuntruths because of e.g. bad research, out-of-date disproved hypotheses, orauthorial error is not a work of fiction, even if it is so bad that the majority ofits contents are untrue – it is simply a bad work of historiography or text-book; a literary fiction which contains a great amount of factual truth, even ifthe majority of its statements are facts (because it is an extremely well-researched historical novel), is not a work of history, and anyone who read itas such would clearly have missed the point. Authorial intention is evidentlycrucial in determining whether such works are history or fiction (not the pro-portion of truths : untruths!), but while this can usually be easily determinedin modern works (from the cover, from how a book is marketed, etc.), it isnotoriously hard to determine in ancient works. The addition of linguisticcriteria such as Cohn’s for modern texts, if such could be found in ancientGreek, would therefore be highly desirable.

Unfortunately, there is no special perversion of the tenses which is com-mon only to fictional texts in ancient Greek as in English; but fortunately,it is the underlying phenomenon of which this is an indicator which is thefocus of Cohn’s distinction (building on the work of Hamburger).9 Cohnand Hamburger argue that, contrary to the kind of narratological analysisthat describes ‘internal focalisation’ by an ‘external narrator’ (e.g. a biogra-pher ‘seeing’ events from the perspective of her/his subject), such forms of

9 Cohn (1999) and Hamburger (1973). Cohn revises and at times disagrees substantially with Ham-burger, while taking the germ of a theory from her work, so it is to Cohn’s work only that I refer inany detail in this chapter.



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words should not be seen merely as that – i.e. as a mode of discourse – butas a (or perhaps the) defining feature of fiction; as a mode of discourse thatis ruled out in non-fictional texts (Cohn 1999: 25, 119). This is the argu-ment for the strangeness of the example sentence quoted at the beginningof this section, were it to appear in a work of history; but also for any ‘inter-nal focalisation’ (however worded) in a third-person narrative indicating itsfictional status10, since by definition this gives the narrator such omnis-cience, even psychic omniscience, as would seem extremely incongruouswithout a disclaimer making it clear that the author either had evidence forthe subject’s thoughts at the time (such as an autobiographical memoir byher/him) or was speculating rather than reporting a known fact (this iswhere the ‘s/he must have thought…’ formulation comes in). This seemsentirely consistent with modern writing and reading practices11, and if itwere applicable to ancient texts this would give a simple way of determin-ing (intentional) fictionality: simply scouring the Greek bioi and otherworks for examples of ‘internal focalisation’ would produce the answer, atleast for texts where this form of language is found.12

There are problems with this approach, however: unlike Hamburger,Cohn emphasises that these ‘rules’ are not hard and fast, but that we noticewhen a text shifts from one perspective to another and thus become newly- orextra-aware of the fictionality of the text: the ‘rules’ hold in general, andexplain why:

biographies that regale us with inside views of their subjects strikeus as somehow illegitimate; and, conversely, why a novel thatremained from start to finish in the mode of external focalization onthe protagonist would strike us as something of an anomaly. (1999:26)

The lack of a hard-and-fast rule regarding the use of internal focalisation inmodern texts does not inspire confidence for finding such in ancient ones;

10 Autobiographical texts are ruled out of the present study since entirely different criteria and argu-ments must be used in this case (internal focalisation is the norm in autobiographical texts, and thereis nothing ‘psychic’ or ‘omniscient’ about narrating private moments and thoughts in them!

11 Cohn has many more examples in the relevant chapters and elsewhere (1999: 18-37, 79-95).12 This last qualifier is needed because the absence of internal focalisation/psychic omniscience would

not prove that a text is historical, obviously; its presence is ruled out, on this hypothesis, in non-fiction, but its presence is not a necessary condition for fiction, it is only a device available to (andwidely employed by) writers of fiction.


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however, examining the ways in which internal focalisation or psychicomniscience (and related phenomena) are employed in ancient texts may yetbe revealing. Another, potentially larger problem is simply that it may not: isCohn’s (last-quoted) statement true for ancient Greek texts? ‘What wouldPlutarch do?’ This is something that must be left for the investigationitself13, which will begin with some examples from Plutarch as test-cases,before moving to biographical texts whose fictional or historical status is lessclear-cut.

Procedure of the Argument

Taking as a starting point Cohn’s observation that in modern fictional biogra-phy as in other fictional forms, one of the clearest markers of deliberate fic-tionality is the psychic omniscience of the narrator14, and her argument thatit is constitutive of a narrative’s fictional status, since it is logically ruled outby non-fictional narratives, this paper will investigate the actual use made ofpsychically omniscient narration in ancient Greek biographical texts, to see ifany conventions or differing practices in its use can be found. At the sametime, the potential applicability of such observations and therefore of Cohn’sargument to these ancient texts will be considered, since there may be prob-lems with transferring the theory to Antiquity as noted above. The centralfocus of the investigation will be on biographical texts whose fictional statusis in question: they might be taken as (deliberate/conscious) fictions (whoseintended readers could read them in the same way as they might have readChariton or Achilles Tatius); or ‘popular’ romanticising or mythologisingtexts aimed at uneducated and credible readers; or as historical biographieswhich due to differing expectations of historiographical responsibility inAntiquity now appear to us as anything but historical; etc. The texts used asexamples here are Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the Aesop Romance, the AlexanderRomance, and Philostratus’ Vita Apollonii. These texts have all been consid-ered at least by some readers and scholars as ‘fictional biographies’ (if not

13 A further problem may be the far higher proportion of direct speech used in ancient texts of mostgenres than in their modern equivalents; this could reduce or replace the need for narratorial psychicomniscience. But provided enough examples can be found, it does not matter that they are propor-tionally fewer.

14 Or in other terminology, any use of ‘zero focalisation’, and/or any striking uses of internal focalisationof the biographical subject. I largely follow Cohn’s terminology in this paper.



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always in these exact words)15, and arguments for this status have variedaccording to the (propositional) content of the text, what (if anything) isknown of the author, etc.; but they have not included reference to their lin-guistic features determining their fictionality.

It will be helpful, then, to test these (Cohn’s) criteria as applicable toancient Greek texts by discovering whether texts which we would class as fic-tions either intuitively or by other scholarly arguments will come out as fic-tions on Cohn’s definition, i.e. if they all employ the fictional language ofpsychic omniscience. The first stage of the investigation, though, is to test theground with a Greek novel whose status as deliberate fiction is not in ques-tion, and with Plutarch, who of all ancient Greek biographers (and in a verysmall minority of surviving biographical texts) is accepted as the most ‘histor-ical’ or ‘serious’, using standards of historiographical responsibility that wereacceptable in his day and are akin to those that his modern equivalentemploys.16 The comparison between these will enable us to see which ofthese two the main texts under investigation are most like in their use (oravoidance) of psychic omniscience.

If this distinction appears to hold true by and large for ancient Greek bio-graphical narratives (though perhaps with exceptions, since these are not‘hard and fast’ rules, as noted above), it will not only add extra weight tocumulative arguments regarding the (deliberate) fictional status of these par-ticular biographies and others to which it could be applied, and potentially beexpanded to texts in all (third-person narrative)17 genres in Antiquity – it willalso, and more importantly, reveal something about authors’ and readers’concepts of fiction in ancient Greece, by showing that a linguistic or formalfeature might have been at least implicitly recognised as a convention appro-priate to fictional writing, above and beyond any arguments ancient ormodern regarding the truth-value of texts’ propositional contents, authorialintentions, or anything else. The use of psychically omniscient narration

15 Holzberg (1995: 14-9) is a classic example, labelling precisely these four texts as fictional biography.See Karla (2009) for discussion of this classification: she argues for a further distinction, labelling theAesop and Alexander Romances ‘novelistic biographies’. For my purposes here, it is only the distinctionbetween (deliberate) fictions and (‘serious’) biography which matters, not the precise label given to theformer class of texts nor any sub-categories into which it might be divided. See also Jouanno (2009)on the fictionality and generic categorisation of these two texts.

16 Pelling (1990) is the classic examination of Plutarch’s historiographical responsibility and of how farhe will go in the direction of fiction – the result being ‘not very far’, though further than his modernsuccessors.

17 See note 10 above.


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could be counted in Antiquity as well as in modern literature as a signpostpointing to a text’s fictional status, i.e. as a metafictional marker – whichwhen recognised as such by the experienced reader ensured the text was readas the author conceived it, rather than as a bad piece of historical biographyor anything else.

Limit Cases: the Novels and Plutarch

For comparison then, here is a passage from one of the Greek novels; theseare evidently conscious (and self-conscious) fictions, and therefore their nar-rators naturally enough allow themselves psychic levels of insight into thecharacters’ thoughts and private actions18:

[…] !"#$%& "'$() *"+(),-+-+, .+/ 0 1"+()23 4) 156723 !589. : 7( µ;)2<) 1"+-8&) 2=. >?&( […] @-A ?; +=7#3 &B8& 7C) DE89), .+/ 7F)GH%+$µF) 2=. *.5'7&( .+/ "2$$I *$'$&( J'H)()· 752H#3 Kµ,$&(,)L.765 KM5L")&(, 7#3 !M,$A3 .+7&H5N)&(·

[Chloe] went away, thinking how handsome [Daphnis] was. Andthat thought was the beginning of love. She didn’t know what washappening to her […] Her heart ached; her eyes wandered uncon-trollably; she kept repeating “Daphnis”. She took no interest infood; she lay awake at night; she disregarded her flock […]

Longus Daphnis & Chloe (trans. Morgan) 1.13.5-6

Of course, this form of expression is perfectly acceptable to a novel’s reader-ship, and this is true of Antiquity as much as today. By contrast, let us con-sider the work of a biographer who exercises historiographical responsibility,namely Plutarch, and his practices when intending to convey the thoughts ofhis characters.

Now Plutarch does frequently communicate the thoughts of his charac-ters, and sometimes in a manner similar to the fictional narrator’s psychi-cally omniscient perspective, but there is often explicitly and always

18 In the absence of any biographical text so obviously (consciously) fictional as the novels and univer-sally accepted as being so, the fictional limit of the fiction-history spectrum must be represented bythe example of the Greek novel. The examples in this section only serve to demonstrate ancientauthors’ awareness and employment of distinctions between forms of narrative technique particularlysuited to fictions and unsuited to historiography and biography, so the lack of a fictional biography toprovide examples here is not important.



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implicitly an explanation for this privileged insight. Some examples takenfrom his Alexander19:

OH%A ?, "27& .+/ ?5'.6) .2(µ6µ,)A3 7#3 P$Eµ"('?23 "+5&.7&-7+µ,)23 7Q -Rµ+7(· .+/ 72S72 µ'$(-7+ 72S T($U""2E 7V) 1567+ .+/ 7I3H($2H52-L)+3 !µ+E5F-+( $,M2E-(), W3 µA?; H2(7X) 17( "2$$'.(3 "+5’+=7C) !)+"+E-Nµ&)2), &Y7& ?&U-+)7' 7()+3 µ+M&U+3 *"’ +=7Q .+/H'5µ+.+ 7#3 ME)+(.N3, &Y7& 7C) 0µ($U+) W3 .5&U772)( -E)2L-A3!H2-(2Lµ&)2).

Moreover, a serpent was once seen lying stretched out by the side ofOlympias as she slept, and we are told that this, more than anythingelse, dulled the ardour of Philip’s attentions to his wife, so that heno longer came often to sleep by her side, either because he fearedthat some spells and enchantments might be practised upon him byher, or because he shrank from her embraces in the conviction thatshe was the partner of a superior being.

Alexander 2.4

In this passage, though private events and thoughts are communicated, theunderlined phrases show that (a) Plutarch is not claiming outright or on hisown authority the historicity of these statements, only reporting what othershad written or speculating himself on possible psychological explanations forthe events he reports, and (b) in considering alternative explanations (a prac-tice familiar in historiographers from Herodotus onwards) and not choosingbetween them, he is actively disclaiming the kind of psychic abilities appro-priate to a novel’s narrator.

19 I choose Alexander for my examples because its subject has perhaps the most prolifically fictionalisedand mythologised (as well as biographically and historically documented) life of any of Plutarch’s bio-graphical subjects; thus if he had been tempted to lapse in the histioriographical responsibility withwhich he treated a life and employed ‘fictional’ forms of narration, this would be one of the mostlikely texts in which to find such lapses. The same kinds of examples and resulting discussion couldhave come from any of Plutarch’s Lives, though, and Plutarch’s statements about his techniques andintentions in any of the Lives can be taken to apply to all of them. Other likely candidates would ofcourse be Romulus and Theseus; Plutarch claims for the latter (Theseus 1) that he will follow others’accounts, mythologising though they be for such an era, but will try to subject it to reason and ‘purifythe mythic’ in it (cf. Bowersock 1994: 1-2). But cf. Pelling 1990: 41-2 on the consistency with whichPlutarch is ready (or not) to reconstruct or invent across the series of Lives. Text and trans. of Alexan-der from Perrin 1919.


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In another example (this time of narratorial omniscience but not of thepsychic kind), Alexander 30.4-7, the realism in the Greek author’s verbatimknowledge of an explicitly private speech delivered by the Persian king Dariusin the company only of his eunuch (4: “7V) &=)2S82) *)?27,56 7#3 -.A)#3!"+M+MR)”; “leading the eunuch away into a more secluded part of his tent”)is questionable: how could Plutarch have come by a text of this speech? Whatlikely source was there for the preserved speech after Darius’ death which wasshortly to follow? Aware of this passage’s potential similarity to the omni-sicient narration of a novelist, Plutarch closes the section as follows (7): 7+S7+µ;) 2Z76 M&),-%+( 7& .+/ $&8%#)+U H+-() 2[ "$&\-72( 7F) -EMM5+H,6) (“thatthese things were thus done and said is the testimony of most historians”),thus avoiding a necessary claim to the historicity of this private speech andtherefore a claim to believe the sources for it, while managing to include thestory nonetheless.

A final type of example from Plutarch is one in which no explicit dis-claimer is made for his psychic abilities, e.g.:

7N7& ?’ 2<) 0 ]+-($&^3 !)(+%&/3 7_ µ&7+",µD&( 72\3 µ;) -75+7(R7+(32=. 1H5+-& 7V !$A%,3, !$$’ […] !)'.$A-() *-9µ+)&).

At the time, then, although he was annoyed by the summons, theking did not tell his soldiers the truth about it but […] sounded arecall.

Alexander 33.7

But even here there are indications of a potential disclaimer; in its openingwords, Plutarch gives us to understand that Alexander may have revealed histrue feelings at a later time, and thus they came to be recorded in one of hissources. Moreover, even without this hint, there is always an underlying andimplicit reliance on other historians’ accounts in Plutarch – the fact that theyare frequently alluded to in phrases such as ‘we are told’ or ‘most historians’(as above), and occasionally even by name, means that we are entitled toassume that Plutarch is using sources also at other times; such claims in par-ticular cases are also to be taken as claims for the properly researched anddocumented (by ancient historiographical standards) nature of the wholebiography.

Therefore at this other end of the fiction-history spectrum from the Greeknovels, in Plutarch’s bioi, though there are examples which appear to be for-



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mally and logically the same as fictional writers’ psychic omniscience andother omniscient narration, there are either explicit disclaimers to be found inclose proximity, or else disclaimers elsewhere in the text (in the form of men-tioning historiographical techniques and sources) can be taken by implicationto cover the whole of the bios. The task of the remainder of this paper is toexamine texts which sit more towards the middle than the extremes of thishistory-fiction spectrum (by common scholarly consent and by their own rela-tive lack of clarity regarding their historical or fictional status), and to discoverwhat their authors’ practices are in using or avoiding psychic omniscience.

Psychic Omniscience in Fictional(ising) Biographies

There is obviously great difficulty, given the difference between ancient andmodern approaches to historiographical writing (ancient authors far less fre-quently stating that they are using, still less specifying, earlier accounts orother evidence), in determining what is to count as a case of ‘psychic omnis-cience’: many (perhaps all) passages posited as examples might be counteredby arguing that they are in fact instances of ‘serious’ biographers suppressingtheir sources. Some circularity in arguing for cases of psychic omnisciencemight not be avoidable therefore. This is perhaps least likely to be thoughtdangerous to my argument when examples come from texts which presentmany other indications of their fictional status, whether internal (i.e. formal)or external (e.g. comparison with their authors’ practices in other texts, or thelikelihood of the author having access to any sources for the events herelates).

This being the case, I shall begin with Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, for the fol-lowing reasons. First, we can compare his practice in writing this text with hispractices as a ‘serious’ historiographer on the one hand and as a writer ofSocratic dialogues on the other. Even slight familiarity with the former kindof writing reveals that Xenophon is of course capable of maintaining anappropriate level of historiographical responsibility when he chooses; andwith the latter, that he is perfectly happy to fictionalise the lives of historicalfigures in the appropriate genre.20 Given the Cyropaedia’s hybridity of genre,including both more historiographical-style writing and also extended dia-

20 One would be hard pressed to find a scholar now who believed that Socratic dialogues such as those ofPlato or Xenophon make any pretense to be historical accounts.


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logue passages in the Socratic mode, the likelihood that Xenophon expectedhis readers to accept his account of Cyrus’ life as (solely) a straightforwardpiece of historiography with that genre’s implicit claims to historicity and to areliance on sources, is very slim; rather, he would have expected them to rec-ognise that his work had other purposes (e.g. literary entertainment, philo-sophical or political education, and the generic experimentation itself ) whichmight justify or explain embellishment and even pure invention of speeches,conversations, and events within his account.

Secondly, the likelihood that Xenophon could have had access to anysources presenting the early years of Cyrus’ life in such detail as would havebeen necessary for the writing of the Cyropaedia, is sufficiently slim that itsreaders must at least suspect the historicity of some of the account – as indeedreaders long have done in labelling it a ‘romance’ or ‘novelistic biography’.21

In this case, then, all indicators point to a consciously fictionalising biogra-phy, and this might be further confirmed by use of a form of writing whichseems (at least to modern eyes) peculiar to fiction, psychic omniscience; con-versely, finding this form of writing in such a text might begin to build acumulative case that ancient authors too generally reserved it for deliberatefictions.

The following is a classic case of what might be termed character or inter-nal focalisation, which following Cohn I would label as psychic omniscienceon the part of the narrator:

0 ?; `S523 05F) *.]2A%2S)7+3 .+/ 72^3 @$$2E3 "+--E?U, *.]2A%&\ .+/+=7V3 "5F72) 7N7& a"$+ *)?L3, 2b"27& 2cNµ&)23· 2Z763 *"&%Lµ&(+=72\3 *d2"$U-+-%+(· µ'$+ ?; .+$I 4) .+/ e5µN772)7+ +=7Q f 0"'""23 "&5/ 7V -Fµ+ *"&"2UA72. 2Z76 ?C *d2"$(-'µ&)23 "52-9$+-&7Q g""h. .+/ 0 i-7E'MA3 *%+Lµ+-& µ;) 7U)23 .&$&L-+)723 j.2(, aµ63?; &B"&) +=7Q µ,)&() "+5’ k+E7N).

When Cyrus saw the rest marching out with all speed, he put on hisarmour then for the first time and started out, too; this was anopportunity that he had thought would never come – so eager washe to don his arms; and the armour that his grandfather had madeto order for him was very beautiful and fitted him well. Thus

21 It is so often discussed by scholars of the ancient novel/romance as a forerunner to the genre or proto-novel that its absence from Reardon’s original Collected Ancient Greek Novels needs to be justified(1989: 3).



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equipped he rode up on his horse. And though Astyages wonderedat whose order he had come, he nevertheless told the lad to comeand stay by his side.

Cyropaedia (trans. Miller) 1.4.18

The underlined parts here show, in the first two instances, Cyrus’ thoughts,and in the third, those of Astyages; the second case might be seen instead asnarratorial comment, but in its context surrounded by other internal focalisa-tion it reads better as the narrator still giving us privileged access to the youngCyrus’ perceptions and feelings as he donned the armour for the first time.

This form of writing is characteristically fictional: the information it con-veys could not be known by a third person narrator, unless he had access to avery detailed autobiography or authorised biography of the subjects in whichall their thoughts were relayed as well as their deeds. But more important isthe form itself, in which the narrator swoops with ease from an external,bird’s-eye-view perspective, into the thoughts of one character then another,then back out again – entirely natural in a novel or an epic, but not in histo-riographical writing. An historian or a serious biographer can, of course, tellus about the thoughts of their subjects, but this is usually phrased differently,either in such a way as to show that the narrator is speculating or inferringthe thoughts from the actions (‘he must have thought…’), or to show that hehas grounds for making such a statement in the form of another historicalaccount or a source (see above for these practices in modern biographies andin Plutarch).

This psychically omniscient form of expression is repeated countless timesin the Cyropaedia (there are further examples below), and this helps to ensurethat it is or can be read as a fictional text, or as a fictionalising biography. Atthe same time, the fact that Xenophon’s project in the Cyropaedia seems forseveral other reasons to be that of deliberately fictionalising an account ofCyrus’ life, and chooses to use this form of expression, provides a firstinstance in what will form a cumulative argument showing that psychicomniscience was associated in Antiquity too with deliberate fictions and notdeemed appropriate for serious historiographical writings.22

22 Other examples can be found throughout Cyropaedia.: just in the vicinity of the previous example, see1.4.15, 20 and 24 (all focalised through / with the narrator psychically reporting Astyages’ thoughts).


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The so-called Aesop Romance is another biographical work which is (sinceit is widely labelled as such) widely accepted as novelistic or fictionalisingbiography, full as it is of folkloric and fable-like elements. But where preciselyis its fictionality signposted? Among other things, this is demonstrated byomniscient (possibly psychically so) narration, as for example23:

l ?; mY-6"23, -H2?52S .+Lµ+723 n)723, &B"&) "5V3 k+E7N) “?L2 o5+3186 !"V 72S "52-7'72E &c3 !)'"+E-()· .2(µA%9-2µ+( 7I3 72S.+Lµ+723 7+L7+3.” *"($&d'µ&)23 ?, 7()+ 7N"2) […] !)&"+L&72. 1)%+[…] 0 "27+µV3 p8&(· .+/ µ+$+.2S ")&Lµ+723 n)723 […] q&HL52E, 7I8$2&5I 7()+8%,)7+ HE7I .+7,")&E-&) +b5+) 7#3 ",5(d Z$A3 […] r?,+).+/ "52-A)#.

It was very hot, and Aesop said to himself, “The overseer allows metwo hours for rest. I’ll sleep these hours while it’s hot.” He pickedout a spot [… and] went to sleep. The stream whispered and, as agentle zephyr blew, the leaves of the trees around about were stirredand exhaled a sweet and soothing breath […]

Aesop Romance 6

In this passage, Aesop is alone, and so the narrator is necessarily taking anomniscient perspective in order to relate this episode to us, as he doesthroughout the text. Note that there is no historiographical apparatus in thistext – no claims to have heard or read the story elsewhere, or to have derivedit ultimately from Aesop’s own accounts of his life (the only possible sourcefor events which no one else was present to witness), which might makeimplicit claims to cover the narrator’s apparent omniscience as with Plutarchabove. But in any case, Aesop is asleep at this point, and so there are no wit-nesses to the changes in his surroundings as narrated here; there could be nopossible claim to documented historicity here, and readers can only concludethat the author is consciously writing a fiction and allowing the fact to bemade plain to them. The underlined phrase “&B"&) "5V3 k+E7N)” (“said tohimself ”), if taken as a way of narrating Aesop’s internally voiced thoughtsrather than literally spoken out loud to himself, makes the narrator here psy-chic as well as omniscient, but it is impossible to decide either way.

23 Text of Aesop Romance from Vita G (cod. 397 Bibliothecae Pierponti Morgan) recensio 3, edited byPerry (1952: 35-77); translation by Daly in Hansen (1998: 111-62).



25

The expression ‘said to himself ’ is frequent in this text, in fact, and thereare examples where it must refer to internally voiced thoughts rather thanspoken out loud, e.g.:

[The wife of Aesop’s master Xanthus is about to wash the feet of ananonymous rustic to win an argument between Xanthus and Aesopand earn the latter a beating.]

r ME)C 72S s')%2E ?(I 7V µ\-23 7V "5V3 7V) mY-6"2) "&5(t6-+µ,)A$,)7(2)… "52-,H&5&) 7C) $&.')A) 7Q d,)h. 0 d,)23 )29-+3 a7( *-7/)r 2c.2?,-"2()+ "5V3 k+E7V) &B"&) “s')%23 *-7/ H($N-2H23· &c p%&$&)72^3 "N?+3 µ2E u"V ?2L$2E "$E%#)+( *"(7&7'8&( @), &c ?, µ2( 7(µC)"+5,86) 7C) ME)+\.+ 7C) k+E72S K)'M.+-&) "$E%#)+( *"(7&7'8&( @), &c?, µ2( 7(µC) "+5,86) 7C) ME)+\.+ 7C) k+E72S K)'M.+-&) )UD+( µ2E72^3 "N?+3, *µ+E7Q !7(µU+) 2= "&5(]'$$6, 2= "&5(&5M'-2µ+(...” .+/ ?C)(D'µ&)23 !)&"+L&(.

Xanthus’ wife hated Aesop so much that she tied a towel aroundher… and took the basin over to the stranger. He saw that she wasthe lady of the house and said to himself, “Xanthus is a philosopher.If he wanted my feet washed by a slave, he would have ordered it,but if he has made his wife wash my feet to show me honor, I’ll notdisgrace myself and be a busybody…” And he took his ease whilethey were being washed.

Aesop Romance 61

Clearly the rustic does not voice these thoughts, but rather sits back to havehis feet washed. The statement that “)29-+3 a7( *-7/) r 2c.2?,-"2()+” (“hesaw [lit.: “thought”, “realised”] that she was the lady of the house”) is also thework of a psychically omniscient narrator. In the Aesop Romance, then, wehave another coincidence between a text that is considered for other reasonsand is prima facie fictional or fictionalising, and the use of psychically omnis-cient narration.

The Alexander Romance contains a great many fantastic elements whichguarantee the fictionality of its content, but if its author(s) had chosen topresent themselves as historiographical biographers, merely recording thesefantastic voyages to the ends of the earth as found in others’ accounts of Alex-ander’s life, we would be faced with a text of very different fictional status. As


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it is, the text makes no claims to using sources or other historians’ accounts,and thus again, unlike the case of Plutarch’s Alexander but as in the case of theAesop Romance, we cannot assume an implicit disclaimer or explanation ofthe narrator’s psychic omniscience when it is used. Here is an example likethe last one from the Aesop Romance, using ‘he said to himself ’ to denote acharacter’s inwardly voiced thoughts24:

[Alexander has come in disguise as an emissary to Darius but is rec-ognised by one of Darius’ commanders.]

.+/ .+7+)29-+3 *"(&(.F3 7V) i$,d+)?52) &B"&) *) k+E7Q· “2v7N3 *-7()0 T($U""2E "+\3, &c .+/ 72^3 7L"2E3 +=72S p$$+d&) […]” 2v723 2<)"$A52H25A%&/3 […] a7( +=7N3 *-7() 0 i$,d+)?523, "52-+)+.$(%&/3 7QJ+5&Uh &B"&) +=7Q· “[…] 2v723 0 "5,-]E3 i$,d+)?5N3 *-7() 0w+.&?N)6) ]+-($&^3...”

And having taken a reasonably long look at Alexander, he said tohimself, “This is Philip’s son, even if he has changed his appearance[…]” Convinced […] that it was Alexander himself, he leaned overto Darius and said to him, “[…] this emissary of Alexander is theking of the Macedonians himself [...]”

Alexander Romance 2.15

It is clear from what follows and from the whole context that the first ‘quota-tion’ expresses his thoughts and not something said out loud. Therefore wehave here an example of psychic omniscience by the narrator. Another exam-ple is given in the form of the following scene, which surely the king of Persiawould never allow anyone to witness; certainly the presence of anyone butDarius is not mentioned:

l ?; J+5&\23 HEMI3 M&)Nµ&)23 4$%&) &c3 7V "+$'7(2) +=72S .+/ xUD+3k+E7V) &c3 7V 1?+H23 !)2(µRd+3 ?'.5E-() *%59)&( k+E7V) […]-EµH25+\3 ?; 72(+L7+(3 -E)&8Nµ&)23 *%59)&( k+E7V) $,M6)· “07A$(.2S723 ]+-($&^3 J+5&\23 […] )S) HEMI3 *M&)NµA) 15Aµ23…”

24 Text of Alexander Romance from the ] recension, edited by Bergson (1965); translation by Dowden inHansen (1998: 168-246; adapted).



27

Darius came, a fugitive, to his own palace and threw himself on thefloor, wailing and tearfully lamenting for himself […] In the grip ofsuch calamities, he mourned to himself, saying: “Darius, [once] sogreat a king […] – now I have become a solitary fugitive […]”

Alexander Romance 2.16

The implausibility of this scene happening other than with the king alone,unless a witness were mentioned in the text, means that the narrator is surelygranting himself privileged access to private events and thoughts here too.

The examples in this section thus far have come from texts which scholarsagree are either fictional or (perhaps for the Cyropaedia) fictionalising bio-graphical texts – not to say that nothing any of them relates is true, but thatthey contain so much clearly fictional and/or folkloric content and are writtenin such a way that no one would claim that they are failed attempts at Plutar-chan or similar serious biography, but are rather deliberate fictions. It is nosurprise then to find them all employing a trademark strategy of novelists andother writers of fiction in psychic omniscience. As a final example, I now turnto Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius (though this is not its original title, no onewould dispute that biography is one of the most important genres for the cre-ation of this generic hybrid of a text25), a work which has increasingly beencompared with the Greek novels and come to be recognised as a work of fic-tion.26 However, this text’s fictionality is self-consciously masked (or pointedout) by an elaborate Beglaubigungsapparat, in the form of an invented bio-graphical account by a certain Damis, a possibly invented and convenientlyvery constant companion of Apollonius, upon which Philostratus is supposedto have based his biography.27 This means that it has the same historiographi-cal apparatus as a Plutarchan biography: it claims to be based on anothersource, thereby distancing itself from necessarily claiming the truth of all the‘facts’ it relates and making that source responsible for any knowledge that itwould be implausible for a historical biographer to have acquired about hissubject. Thus any seeming examples of psychic omniscience on the part of the

25 See most recently Jones’ edition for a concise summary of the issues concerning its genre (2005: 3-7).26 See especially Bowie (1978, 1994); Francis (1998); Gyselinck & Demoen (2009); Schirren (2009).27 On the fictionality of Damis, see Bowie (1978) and Francis (1998). For a discussion of the role of

‘Damis’ and his account in VA which aptly employs the concept of metafiction, see Gyselinck &Demoen (2009).


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narrator can always be explained away by the intermediary of Damis. Take forinstance the following28:

[Apollonius has taken a vow of silence.]

72S72) *"("2)R7+72) +u7Q HA-( M&),-%+( 7V) ]U2) a$6) ",)7& *7F)!-.A%,)7+, "2$$I µ;) MI5 &c"&\) 182)7+ µC &c"&\) […] $NM6) 7&"52-.52E-')76) +=7Q "+5&\)+( 7I3 *$,Md&(3 7N7&.

He says that this way of life, which he practised for five whole years,was extremely difficult. He could not speak when he had much tosay […] and when remarks offended him he deferred refuting themfor a time.

Philostratus, VA 1.14.2-15.1

Now of course many of Apollonius’ feelings and thoughts while silent wereaccessible to him alone, and without the device of Damis or something simi-lar, the narrator would have had to use a form of expression which constitutespsychic omniscience to convey this information. But instead, he refersimplicitly here to the fact (HA-(, “he says”) that Damis had supposedlyrecorded what Apollonius himself told him in the composition of his biogra-phy; and 7N7& (“for a time”, lit.: “at that time”), implying that Apolloniuslater came back to his erstwhile (inter)locutors to refute them, gives yetanother get-out clause for a narration wishing to avoid the fictional device ofpsychic omniscience, since it would theoretically be possible to verify fromothers’ accounts these tardy come-backs and the fact that Apollonius claimedto have thought them up on the original spot!

Another example of the narrator informing us of Apollonius’ thoughtswhich could have been treated by an author of fiction by the device of psy-chic omniscience, but where Philostratus avoids it, is the following:

HA-/ ?; 0 J'µ(3 dE)(,)+( µ,), a7( µA?;) +c79-2(, 7N) 7& 75N"2) +=72S.+%&65+.R3, .+/ &c?y3 &=8Nµ&)2) 72\3 %&2\3 &=8C) 72(+L7A), “z %&2U,?2UA7& µ2( µ(.5I 18&() .+/ ?&\-%+( µA?&)N3,” *H&-7A.N7+ µ,)72( 05F).+/ *)%Eµ2Eµ,)h aµ2(2), 2Y&-%+( W3 +c79-2( µ,), ]+-+)Ut2( ?,, a 7(µ,$$&( +c79-&().

28 Philostratos VA, text and translation taken from Jones (2005), with chapter divisions restored to thestandard numbering (see Hodkinson 2006).



29

Damis claims to have guessed that Apollonius was not going tomake any request, since he had observed his ways, and knew thatthe prayer he offered to the gods was this: “Gods, grant that I havelittle and need nothing.” However, when he saw Apollonius silent asif in meditation, he inferred that he was about to ask for something,and was considering what it would be.

Philostr. VA 1.33.2

Here the inferences and insights into Apollonius’ thoughts are those ofDamis, not of the Philostratean narrator; in fact, Philostratus shows us aglimpse of the supposed underlying text of Damis (the corresponding passageof which could be reconstructed from this text), and he shows Damis’ narra-tor himself to be avoiding psychic omniscience and thus writing a historicalbiography. For Damis in the underlying text is reported to have stated explic-itly that his insights into Apollonius’ mind were guesses and inferences basedupon familiarity with his subject’s previous behaviour. Thus Philostratus’ textis insulated against the overtly fictionalising device of psychic omniscience bya double layer of disclaimers: that of Damis’ historiographical technique first,and then implicitly that of Philostratus’ only reporting an earlier text uponwhich he must rely as a source for his subject, and reporting it as Damis’‘claims’ rather than necessarily as facts which he accepts. And in fact, sinceDamis’ text is always underlying that of Philostratus, but naturally not explic-itly referred to at every point of fact upon which it was based (which wouldforce Philostratus to refer to it in almost every sentence), even exampleswhich look like psychic omniscience, if any are to be found, are implicitlyattributable to Damis and not necessarily invested with Philostratus’ belief inthe truth of them.

We might have here a counterexample to the thesis of this section, sincewe have a fictional text which studiously avoids the device of psychic omnis-cience by its actual author-figure/narrator (even if ‘Damis’ might use it). Butthis is only a counterexample if we ignore the obvious reasons for this avoid-ance;29 Philostratus’ text is a more sophisticated and self-conscious fictionthan others we have considered (as befits the Philostratean oeuvre in gen-

29 It is also only a counterexample if one posits use of psychic omniscience as a necessary feature offiction. I would make only the less strong claim that it is among the characteristic and defining fea-tures of fiction (none of which are singly necessary for a text to be considered as fiction), and that atext containing it must be fictional (or fictionalising history, biography, etc.).


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eral).30 The fact that this device is to be found in several more overt and/orless complex fictions on the one hand, but not in serious biography such asPlutarch nor in the VA on the other hand, is in fact another argument for thethesis of this section, that ancients authors recognised psychic omniscience asa quality of very overtly fictional writing.31 Philostratus avoids it because hewishes his biography to have the formal appearance of ‘serious’ biography, atthe same time as wanting to include events which would not be accepted asrationally verifiable or likely by his more serious readers. He would not havewished to be open to the charge of simply fabricating Apollonius’ life, but tostick to (even) a Plutarchan level of historical likelihood would have under-mined his project to tell the story and ‘hagiography’ of the wonder-worker. Inother words, Philostratus was writing biographical fiction or a ‘biographicalnovel’ (by analogy with the modern genre of the historical novel) in which hehad licence to include acts of Apollonius which a sceptical intellectual readerwould reject in a straightforward account, because he employs elaborateauthenticating devices to distance himself from them.32

To conclude this section briefly: psychic omniscience is used in bioi which aremore obviously fictional or fictionalising; on the other hand they are avoidedin historical bioi such as those of Plutarch, and pseudo-historical fictional bioisuch as Philostratus’ VA, because he wants to give that text the appearance ofa ‘Plutarchan’ bios (i.e. one with a similar level of historiographical responsi-bility or ‘seriousness’ to those of Plutarch). This shows that some Greekauthors and readers had already recognised the device of psychic omniscienceand its effects, though not named it; and that there does seem to exist thesame distinction among ancient as among modern texts with regard to the

30 For Philostratean metaliterariness, sometimes extremely complex, see e.g. Bowie (1994) on VA andHeroikos; Grossardt (2009), Gyselinck & Demoen (2009) and Schirren (2009) on VA; Ni Mheallaigh(2005: 53 note 215, 58 note 240, 198-204; forthcoming), Grossardt (2006), Whitmarsh (2009) andHodkinson (2011a, forthcoming) on Heroikos. If any ancient authors of fiction conceived of psychicomniscience and its uses and effects in similar terms to my definition here, Philostratus was certainlyamong them.

31 Of course for the sophisticated target readership of VA, authenticating devices are recognised as such,as are uses and avoidances of particular formal and linguistic features in order to imitate historicalforms of writing; these therefore become metafictional signposts of the text’s fictionality at the sametime as overtly masquerading as signposts of non-fictionality. See Gyselinck & Demoen for the delib-erate distinction Philostratus creates between narrator and author in VA, including the choice to limitthe narrator’s knowledge: “The knowledge of our primary narrator is, very explicitly, limited: he is notomniscient, and therefore not a typical narrator of fiction” (2009: 108; passim).

32 See Gyselinck & Demoen (2009: 108-14) on the more miraculous elements of VA and Philostratus’strategy in relation to them and to sceptical readers.



31

kinds of text which use it and avoid it. There could always be counterexam-ples, though I have not found any obvious ones (though the seeming coun-terexample of the VA in fact works in favour of the thesis). But, for instance,a badly-written serious bios could include psychic omniscience, which wouldthen seem as jarring in that text as it would if Plutarch had employed thedevice – for the educated ancient reader as much as for us, I would argue –and such a text might be taken as a deliberate fiction rather than an attemptat a serious bios. The reverse type of counterexample would be a fictional textwhich simply happens not to employ the device, rather than deliberatelyavoiding it; but as argued above, this would not be a true counterexamplebecause my thesis is not that psychic omniscience (nor indeed any narratorialomniscience) is a necessary feature of fiction, merely a characteristic feature.

Therefore, the formal, narratological feature of psychic omnisicence is afeature which can (in conjunction with others) identify a text as likely to be adeliberate fiction, and as likely to be recognised as such by ancient readers.On its own this is not a secure means of distinguishing between categories ofGreek bioi for the reasons outlined above, but distinctions following this cri-terion do accord with what is intuitive and/or scholarly communis opinio onwhich are fictional and which non-fictional among Greek biographical texts.This means that, as hypothesised at the beginning of this paper, they (andindeed Greek works in other genres) can be defined and distinguished(including by their contemporary readers) as fiction or not on formal criteria,and not only by hypothesising their authors’ intentions from their contentsand their truth-value as has often been assumed.

Indeed, it is often tacitly assumed that because there is no clearly equiva-lent and co-extensive word for ‘fiction’ in Antiquity, at least some texts whichwe would recognise and be quick to label as fictions (not the novels, but per-haps some clearly fictional(ising) biographies for example, especially wherethe authorship or dating or genre or purpose of the work are disputed) wouldnot be thought of as belonging to a separate category cognate with our cate-gory of ‘fiction’ by their authors or original readers. If my thesis here isaccepted, however, then we must be ready to see an implicit, and a more uni-versal than hitherto accepted, conception of the category of fiction amongeducated ancient readers. That is to say that formal, linguistic devices such aspsychic omniscience which are characteristic of fiction, must be recognised asclear metafictional signposts which therefore necessarily mean that the textscontaining them are deliberate fictions, and are intended to be (and likely to


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be by the target readership) read as such. This applies not only to biographi-cal texts – questions over the fictionality of which are often particularlyfraught because of the lack of a clearly-defined genre before Plutarch andbecause so many have question-marks hanging over their dates and author-ship and therefore their purposes – but also, using bioi as test-cases, to Greekfiction in general.

Further Essentials

In order for the arguments of this paper to be accepted more than provision-ally, this investigation would clearly need to be expanded a great deal toencompass all ancient Greek biographical narratives, and then a range ofother third person narratives, for comparison but primarily of course becausethe argument concerns a general pattern – a few exceptions (i.e. ‘serious’ his-torical narratives unashamedly employing psychic omniscience) would beacceptable, but a large quantity of them would create a different pattern.However, I have of course looked further than the texts used as examples hereand not found anything to alter the pattern at the time of writing. Addition-ally, space does not permit the investigation to expand into other (candidatesfor being) formal distinctions of deliberate fictionality, such as unrealistic lev-els of narratorial knowledge, or narratorial omniscience, which however arenot psychic; or unrealistic levels of detail which are in the text for l’effet duréel rather than because the reader needs to know them and which are there-fore metafictional signposts to the fictionality of the text even while they pre-tend to attest to its veracity.33 Such expansion is necessary because, althoughpsychic omniscience is a good starting point in seeking formal criteria fordeciding a text’s deliberate fictionality, it is in less widespread use in ancienttexts than in the modern novel, and it is more difficult to find clear casessince it is far less often developed to the extremes found in modern texts.34

Whatever is found, then, in future investigations of the particular linguisticdefining feature of fiction highlighted here, and of the patterns of its usage, it

33 Though for the latter see Hodkinson (2011b, forthcoming), which examines metafiction in the lettersattributed to Chion of Heraclea, an epistolary biographical novel.

34 E.g. the extreme case of psychic narration in which the last thoughts and feelings of a dying characterwho, by definition, had no opportunity to share them with anyone, are narrated. Cohn (1999: 21-3)discusses this common topos of modern fictional biography, rightly pointing out that it is one of themost obviously ‘unnatural’ forms of discourse, instantly marking a text out as a conscious fiction(unfortunately there are no such cases to my knowledge in classical texts).



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is hoped that the investigation itself points the way to a fruitful line ofenquiry in the fields of Greek biographical writing, and of ancient fiction andmetafiction more generally.

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