The fourth International Conference on the Ancient Novel (ICAN) took place in the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon in 2008, a tremendous occasion with a thousand delegates. Heroic editorial work by the conference organiser, M. Futre Pinheiro, and various colleagues has resulted in a stream of volumes of conference papers, mostly published as supplements to the journal Ancient Narrative, but with a couple of outriders, such as this one. In each of them she has endeavoured to produce a thematic focus, in this case religion and mythology, approached by every conceivable methodology. Some of the papers, inevitably, have had to be shoe-horned in where they fit least uncomfortably, and this volume, consequently, should not be taken as a systematic or comprehensive treatment of religious and mythological themes and intertexts in ancient fiction. By the end of it, however, a reader should have some sense of the state of ancient novel scholarship nearly 40 years on from B. Reardon's seminal first ICAN.
One section is devoted to a round-table discussion set up by A. Bierl, and reprints the short introductory remarks of each of the participants, including big names such as E. Cueva, J. Bremmer, T. Whitmarsh, F. Graf and M. Zimmerman, but not the discussion that followed. On the night this must have been a stimulating event, but in print the format does not allow ideas to be developed at any length, and this section is particularly frustrating. Keynote headings are used to organise the other, full-length, papers into five somewhat loose groups, leaving potentially complementary papers on Apuleius or Petronius, for example, separated from one another. If there is an unspoken theme which emerges to bind the volume together, it is meta-discursivity, and those of us who are particularly interested in this trend will find rich pickings here. S. Sabnis, for example, contributes a lucid and densely argued paper, ‘Donkey Gone to Hell’, discussing the mill episode in The Golden Ass as an epic katabasis, and demonstrates how it is the tipping-point of the novel's structure, where Lucius graduates from being a passive and enduring Virgilian Aeneas to an active Homeric Odysseus, taking control of the narrative and raising the mundane to epic stature.
Unfortunately, A. Lefteratou's fine paper on Heliodorus' intertextuality with Euripides' two Iphigenia plays, ‘Iphigenia Revisited: Heliodorus’ Aethiopica and the “Der Tod und das Mädchen” pattern', one of the highlights of the book, is marred by the fact that editorial comments and queries have been incorporated into the text, a sign perhaps that the sheer volume of editing in the wake of ICAN IV is taking its toll. The only other papers dealing with the canonical Greek romances are those of E. Suárez de la Torrre and E. Pérez Benito, ‘Love, Mysteries and Literary Tradition: New Experiences and Old Frames’, which traces ritual and literary motifs in the novels' representation of love, perhaps most clearly demonstrated in Achilles Tatius ‘thanks to the transparent presentation of the action and the vicissitudes of the characters’ (p. 60); and of A.M.V. Pizzone on dreams and myths, ‘The Tale of a Dream: oneiros and mythos in the Greek Novel’, which captures well the effect of a destabilisation of reality produced by tenuous and dream-like non-connections. This theme is also central to A. Bierl's paper, ‘From Mystery to Initiation: a Mytho-ritual Poetics of Love and Sex in the Ancient Novel – Even in Apuleius’ Golden Ass', where he applies to Apuleius the bio-ritual, psycho-anthropological approach that he has developed so effectively and influentially for the Greek novels, demonstrating that The Golden Ass also is a rite de passage from adolescence to adulthood. Earlier in the book he expresses well-placed astonishment that other scholars have not followed him along this innovative and insightful hermeneutic path.
R. Drew Griffith's elegantly witty paper, ‘Shamans and Charlatans: Magic, Mixups, Literary Memory in Apuleius’ Golden Ass Book 3', breaks new ground in demonstrating that Apuleius' portrayal of Photis as an Old Comedy alazon somehow connects directly with Sumerian prototypes of the trickster (aluzinnu). Christianity, at the other end of the chronological spectrum, is the starting point for the papers of I. Ramelli, ‘Apuleius and Christianity: the Novelist-philosopher in Front of a New Religion’, which concludes that Apuleius knew about Christianity and disapproved of it, and C.O. Tommasi Moreschini, ‘Gnostic Variations on the Tale of Cupid and Psyche’, which adduces some suggestive material that could, to my mind, have benefited from some contextualisation and elucidation.
Reception provides another way of approaching mythic and philosophical patterns in the ancient text, as in G. Solinas's paper on the relation of the Cupid and Psyche story to the medieval legend of the Fair Melusine and twentieth-century re-workings of that legend by André Breton and the Italian poet Antonio Porta. Archaeology also makes a guest appearance in M.S. Kasyan's paper, ‘The Bees of Artemis Ephesia and the Apocalyptic Scene in Joseph and Aseneth’, which proposes that the characteristic multi-mammary iconography of Ephesian Artemis depicts not breasts but bee-cocoons, and that this image lies behind the climactic scene of the anti-pagan Jewish novella, in which the heroine is mysteriously engulfed by a swarm of white bees. ‘Puella virgo: Rites of Passage in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses', J. Atkins's paper, is in fact less concerned with rites de passage in the Bierl-isch sense than with a philological investigation of Apuleius' vocabulary, which discovers that both Psyche and Charite pass from being a puella to being a virgo in a meaningful pattern. M. Nelson's paper, the last in the volume, connects the roses that will restore Lucius to his human form with ancient practices of sympathetic magic, using arguments of possibility and probability to make up for the absence of any evidence.
Finally two papers on intertextuality in Petronius end up being in different sections of the book. P. Monella's ‘Non humana viscera sed centies sestertium comesse (Petr. Sat. 141,7): Philomela and the Cannibal heredipetae in the Crotonian Section of Petronius’ Satyricon' explores intertextual patterns in the last sections of the extant text and discovers a direct relationship to the narrative of Procne and Philomela in the sixth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. M. Lippman's ‘False Fortuna: Religious Imagery and the Painting-gallery Episode in the Satyricon’ interprets Eumolpus as an ironic priest-substitute in a familiar story pattern exploited by Petronius to kid his reader into expecting a revelation and closure.
As I write this review, preparations are in hand for ICAN V in Houston in 2015. In the capable hands of E. Cueva, it promises to be on a scale to rival the Lisbon novel-fest. However, I end like the old curmudgeon that I am, on a negative note. Good twenty-minute conference papers do not automatically mutate into good publications, and the ruthless drive towards bibliometrically quantifiable outputs has led to too much work with a short scholarly shelf-life being prematurely committed to a permanent form. How many of the papers in the volume under review will be read with profit in ten years' time? Despite the rigorous criteria of acceptance applied in ICAN IV, and despite the lure of the witty misquotation of Apuleius in the book's title (perhaps designed to destabilise the novelist's claim lector, intende: laetaberis), my guess would be one or two.
