Antonius Diogenes

The ancient novel has long been recognised as a key example of fiction in the ancient world, but the implications of this identification have not yet been fully explored. Although in the modern world fiction is widely accepted as neutral and intrinsic to the novel, the lack of equivalent terminology for either ‘fiction’ or ‘novel’ in antiquity challenges any automatic assumption that fiction was a generically conventional and unproblematic part of the ancient novelistic reading experience. By situating the ancient novel within traditions of ancient fiction in theory and practice, as this thesis does, it becomes clear not only that ancient novelistic texts actively explore their own fictional potential, but also that this fictional awareness invites their audiences to consciously consider the effect of fiction upon their reading experience. Consequently, this thesis argues that ancient novelistic fiction acts as a vehicle for the novels’ and their audiences’ engagement with and situation of themselves within imperial culture.

Pseudo-documentarism is a strategy in which an author claims—with varying degrees of irony—to have discovered an authentic document which he transmits to his readers. This article explores three texts of pseudo-documentary
fiction from the Imperial period (Dictys’ Journal of the Trojan War, Antonius Diogenes’ The Wonders Beyond Thule, and Lucian’s True Histories). By suggesting ways in which the implied readers of these texts may be relatable to “real,”
exodiegetic readers, the article illustrates how pseudo-documentarism reflects aspects of the contemporary literary and cultural Zeitgeist.

The principal aim of this study is to contextualize the fragments of the The Wonders beyond Thule in the set of lost novels that have come to us in papyri to gain a fuller understanding of this novel’s stylistic ambitions in comparison with its fragmentary fellow-texts.  To do this, I will devote special attention to a specific issue which offers valuable information about the style and literary level of the text: the treatment of hiatus.
Secondly, I would like to introduce materials from a Hellenistic city on the Banks of the Oxus River in Afghanistan that might have inspired Diogenes’ novel. The modern name of the city is Ai Khanoum but it is not clear what it was called in Antiquity. My focus is  on the archaeological site and the inscriptions which, I suggest, offer us tantalizing paralells for the fictional mise en scène of Diogenes’ novel.

(Under review)

The fragmentary novel of Antonius Diogenes has long been recognised for its fantastical fictions of travel beyond the known world, even as far afield as the Moon itself. The novel, however, is no longer extant and survives primarily in Photius' extensive plot summary in the ninth-century 'Bibliotheca'. What effect does Photius' perspective have on how he describes the novel? Why does Photius go into a disproportionate amount of detail about this novel when others receive a much more cursory and linear summary? This chapter explores Photius' priorities as an editor and compiler, and considers how a concern for authenticity as a literary strategy for reading fiction structures both our reception of the novel and Photius' 'Bibliotheca' more widely.

Antonius Diogenes, author of a lost novel which we only know through the plot summary in Photius’ Bibliotheca, 'Incredibilia de Thule Insula', has often been pointed out as one of the main sources of Lucian’s 'Verae Historiae'. Through an analysis of the original plot transmitted by Photius, we will attempt at revising the integration of Diogenes’ narrative in the context of 1st century paradoxographical literature and its connection to the several utopian texts of which we have notice from the Imperial age.

How do we locate Antonius Diogenes within the broader world of Atticism and the Second Sophistic? Dealing with a fragmentary author poses particular challenges for anyone attempting a more precise account of style and cultural context. This paper presents results of my research into Antonius Diogenes as a writer and as a prose stylist, results achieved while preparing a new edition of and commentary on the Incredible Things beyond Thule. Studying his style and language, I try to shed some light on Antonius Diogenes´ relation to the two major stylistic and intellectual trends of his time, Atticism and Second Sophistic.

I argue that Antonius Diogenes positions himself in a confident and independent relationship with both the Second Sophistic and Atticism: he combines traces of both movements, but nevertheless creates a prose idiom that is very much his own.

The dominant trend among the various manuals and treatises of European Utopian Literature and Thought so far is the assumption that there is a break of two thousand years between Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia, a gap in political idealism, planning and vision, overshadowed by the Christian eschatological concept of the New Jerusalem. The Utopian establishments of the (Montanist) New Jerusalem, the Platonopolis as well as the Theopolis link the utopian thought of Classical Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages and they are still defying the narrow approach of modern scholarship on the History of (pre-modern) Utopian societies. Of course their evolution wasn’t linear since they were influenced by different Cosmo theories and systems of belief but they were always stubbornly present in times of Crisis and Transition, indicating the potential alternative that was remaining latent in Late Antiquity Thought long after Plato and way before Thomas More.

This chapter examines the genre of epistolography, which flourished and proliferated in the variety of its forms and uses in the Empire. The epistolary genre in the Second Sophistic is first briefly situated within rhetorical theory and practice, then contextualized within both earlier Greek literature and developments in Latin letters. The variety of Greek literary uses of the letter form in the Second Sophistic is then illustrated with a series of subgenres and examples. Surveyed are collections of fictional and pseudonymous letters (including Aelian, Alciphron, Philostratus, Apollonius of Tyana), epistolary novels (Chion of Heraclea, Themistocles), shorter narratives in letter form, and letters embedded in longer narratives (including the Greek novels and Lucian’s Verae Historiae).

This paper focuses on Antonius Diogenes’ passages on Pythagoras and his teachings , transmitted in the Life of Pythagoras by the neoplatonist Porphyry, written in the third century. Porphyry quotes Antonius Diogenes several times as a source, ignoring the almost exclusively fictitious character of the novel. Dealing with the debated issue of what the appearance of Pythagoras meant for the novel as a whole, its religious and philosophical substance, I offer a fresh perspective on the issue by comparing the Apista more extensively than has been done before with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The starting point is the observation that in both texts fictitious narratives include a longer Pythagorean digression.
The comparison of the two texts highlights peculiarities of the Apista in dealing with Pythagoras and his doctrine. Furthermore, comparing the Apista to another fictitious narrative tackling Pythagoras can help us to find possible interpretations even if we do not wish directly to discuss intertextuality. We find a number of analogies in how the two authors treat Pythagoras that help us to understand Pythagoreanism in the Apista and that make the idea of a Neo-Pythagorean pamphlet very unlikely. Finally, we observe analogies that are striking not only from a philosophical, but also from a literary point of view, namely narrative and metafictional strategies. By showing these analogies, my paper achieves a second aim, that of enriching a recent scholarly trend pointing out intertextual connections between Greek novelists and Latin poets. 
My paper therefore addresses both a discussion of Pythagorean elements in the Apista and the relationship of Ovid and Antonius Diogenes. The results are linked, for I argue that Pythagoras plays a similar role in both of the texts: At first sight, he seems to give a philosophical meaning to the respective text in an authoritative voice. On closer inspection, in each case narrative and metafictional strategies challenge Pythagoras’ authority and he is, after all, just presenting one concept amongst others of what happens after death.

This book offers a captivating new interpretation of Lucian as a fictional theorist and writer to stand alongside the novelists of the day, bringing to bear on his works a whole new set of reading strategies. Ní Mheallaigh’s thesis is that the aesthetic and cultural issues Lucian faced, in a world of mimesis and replication, were akin to those found in postmodern contexts: the ubiquity of the fake, the erasure of origins, the focus on the freakish and weird at the expense of the traditional. In addition to exploring the texture of Lucian’s own writing, ní Mheallaigh uses Lucian as a focal point through which to examine other fictional texts of the period, including Antonius Diogenes’ Incredible things beyond Thule, Dictys’ Journal of the Trojan war and Ptolemy Chennus’ Novel History, and reveals the importance of fiction’s engagement with its contemporary culture of writing, entertainment and wonder.