A postmodern Palaephatus?

Let us begin with the Preface of the Peri Apiston in which the author states the objectives and methodology followed throughout the rest of the work:

In the passage quoted above, Palaephatus explains that he has composed the Peri Apiston to rebut the credulity and blanket scepticism of two groups of unnamed thinkers regarding the reliability of apista legomena. While acknowledging that apista legomena cannot be regarded as straightforwardly true, as the first group naively assumes, Palaephatus nevertheless denies that the problems these stories pose are insuperable. If heroes had not existed in the past, there would have been no names of heroes and hence no stories about them. The very existence of narrative traditions about the distant past therefore guarantees that something in these stories must really have occurred. Of course, Palaephatus acknowledges that this does not mean that everything that has been reported necessarily took place, citing stories of incredible prodigies or monsters as a case in point. Instead, the task for the critic is to separate out the credible from the incredible information reported in myths rather than to dismiss their factual assertions out of hand, as the second group proposes. In the remainder of the Preface, he explains his research methodology, claiming to have engaged in extensive research visits in which he examined the places in which the relevant myths are said to have occurred and to have obtained further assistance from local elders. Armed with this information, he feels sufficiently confident of his ability to reconstruct what really happened in the past to be able to demonstrate that even the most incredible myths had at least a partial basis in fact.

As we noted above, recent scholarship has tended to doubt this reading of the Peri Apiston on the basis of the alleged discrepancies in style and substance between the project announced in the Preface and that realised in the forty-five genuine entries of the work.Footnote ⁹ Recognising that – despite Palaephatus’ allusions to a number of historiographical texts and use of the autopsy motif – the Peri Apiston cannot be regarded as a work of historiography, the majority of scholars have concluded that the author’s remarks in the Preface are something of a red herring which serve to provide a specious justification for the (notionally) ingenious exercises in mythic rationalisation that follow.Footnote ¹⁰ Diverging from the mythographic view, Hunter reads Palaephatus as foreshadowing Lucian’s True History and Seneca’s Apocolyntosis, wittily interpreting the Peri Apiston’s failure to conform to the canons of historiography as evidence of the author’s deliberate parody of previous historiographers’ claims to be able to recover reliable evidence of past events through the rationalisation of myth. On both interpretations, Palaephatus’ text is exclusively concerned with mythic legomena – that is with myths as stories rather than as sources of information about the past – rather than with the genomena which, according to a more straightforward reading of the Preface, Palaephatus believed gave rise to them.Footnote ¹¹

Both these approaches derive much of their appeal from the fact that Palaephatus clearly exaggerated the extent of his travels and from the text’s failure to live up to the alleged historiographical pretensions of the Preface.Footnote ¹² Yet a degree of exaggeration of personal autopsy was not without precedent in ‘serious’ historiographical writing.Footnote ¹³ Did Hecataeus really ‘discover’ that Heracles had captured a snake nicknamed ‘the Hound of Hades’ on account of its poisonous bite (rather than the three-headed dog Cerberus of popular myth) by visiting Cape Taenarum and speaking with local residents?Footnote ¹⁴ How much empirical research lay behind Ephorus’ claim that the Cimmerians lived in subterranean dwellings, that they only emerged after sunset and that it was for this reason that Homer had said that ‘the sun never gazes upon them’ (Od. 11.15–16)?Footnote ¹⁵ Prestigious historiographers and geographers such as Strabo frequently castigated their predecessors for the invention of historical facts or locations, yet their own practice was often little different.Footnote ¹⁶ As Lloyd has repeatedly emphasised in his studies of ancient Greek science, impressive statements of principle did not necessarily correspond to philosophers’ and scientists’ actual practice.Footnote ¹⁷ In the case of historiographical and geographic authors, too, we should remember that professions of autopsy, like the citation of evidence, were always, in part, a rhetorical strategy, and the propensity of historiographers, on occasion, to sacrifice literal fact to rhetorically plausible fiction brought them much closer to the poets from whom they were so eager to distinguish themselves.Footnote ¹⁸

Nor may we be sure that those places Palaephatus seems to have invented to account for the occurrence of specific myths necessarily establishes the ludic or un-/anti-historiographical character of his text. The fictional-sounding ‘Mount Chimaera’ mentioned in entry 28 recurs both in Strabo (14.3.5) and in the paradoxographer Antigonus (Collection of Marvellous Investigations, 22), while the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, On Marvellous Things Heard, refers to a certain ‘Mount Circe’ (78). Whether this means that there really were places known among locals as ‘Mt Chimaera’ or ‘Mt Circe’, or (much more likely) that there were commonly thought to be such places in the circles in which these authors moved, is not easy to determine. What these examples do illustrate, on the other hand, is just how difficult it is for us to separate ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ in evaluating Palaephatus’ claims and, more to the point, how wary we have to be in assuming that our standards of historiographical accuracy carry over straightforwardly to the historians and geographers of the ancient world. While we may baulk at some of the details of Palaephatus’ reconstructions, we should recall that even those ancient writers who accused poets and logographers of embellishing the facts enjoyed a similar measure of creative licence themselves.

Rationalisation – that is, the reconstruction of past events based on conjectural emendation of corrupt source material – was in fact recognised by many ancient authors as a perfectly legitimate method of historical – and, more specifically, historiographical – inquiry. Writers as varied as Hecataeus, Acusilaus, Herodorus, Hellanicus, Herodotus, Ephorus and Polybius rationalise myths in order to ‘discover’ new facts about the past when existing records prove dissatisfactory or implausible.Footnote ¹⁹ Particularly close to Palaephatus’ approach is that of Strabo, who regarded myths as valuable records of past events, provided that the historian-geographer was capable of separating the kernel of truth these stories contained from the embellishments introduced by poets or other fanciful storytellers.Footnote ²⁰ He therefore repeatedly rationalises mythic stories, especially from the Homeric poems, on the assumption that they contain genuine historical information, even if they appear incredible when taken at face value.Footnote ²¹ For the rhetorically-attuned writers of antiquity, who had moreover grown up with a deep respect for the cultural authority of myth, an explanation – which, even if not directly corroborated by the evidence, nevertheless accounted for the relevant facts while salvaging something from the mass of oral traditions about the past – carried great persuasive force. ‘Theory filled gaps’, as Humphreys has acutely observed.Footnote ²²

Most significantly of all, it is not even clear that Palaephatus did intend to present himself as a historiographer in the Preface. Professions of autopsy were hardly a distinctive feature of historiographical research, and the author aligns himself with the non-historiographers Melissus and Lamiscus the Samian as much as with historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides. All that Palaephatus claimed in the Preface was that he had established that myths did have a partial basis in fact, pace the second group of thinkers mentioned at the beginning, on the strength of his geographical and ethnographical investigations. He need not be understood as having put forward the additional claim that the facts about the past he reconstructed amounted to a full-blown historiographical account. If we wish to give his text a generic label, it would be preferable to characterise the Peri Apiston as an antiquarian work, as we will see in due course.

A final difficulty with the parodic reading is that the sophistication and playfulness Hunter detects in the Preface are notably absent from the banal and repetitive discussions that make up the body of the work.Footnote ²³ As Hawes well observes, ludic readings of the Peri Apiston invariably come up against the problem that Palaephatus was known in antiquity as a serious and learned author; if the Peri Apiston had not been in earnest, the jokes made at his expense by the comic poet Athenion would have lost much of their point.Footnote ²⁴ Whatever the original motivations of the Peri Apiston, it is too simple to account for the very real challenges this text poses to modern disciplinary categories by having recourse to the postmodern devices of playfulness and parody.

The mythographic reading, too, has its difficulties. For Palaephatus seems to have regarded myths not so much as a distinct class of story defined by their wider cultural significance (rather than their uncertain relationship to past events), but rather as a set of corrupt narratives about the distant past which posed significant challenges to historiographers and other writers. If this is right, Palaephatus will, like Thucydides, have conceived of ‘mythic’ stories as ‘fantastic’ or ‘corrupt oral traditions’ about the past, rather than as ‘myths’ in the strong sense required for a mythographic reading.Footnote ²⁵ His interest in myths will then have lain solely in their capacity to communicate genuine facts about the world rather than in their status as myths.

Again, it is revealing that the explicit subject of the text is not the ‘mythic’ – a term which is significantly absent from the Preface – but ‘marvels’ or ‘marvellous stories’, of which myths were just one kind. It is, of course, true that the extant entries exclusively analyse mythic stories, but the possibility remains that the absence of other kinds of ‘marvels’ (apista) from our collection is due to the work of a redactor. In any case, it is significant that Palaephatus frames his analysis in terms of the wider category of ‘marvellous’ or ‘incredible’ stories, a fact that points us to debates about the authority of ‘marvellous’ stories as factual accounts in the period in which Palaephatus was writing. We will return to this point in the next section.

The remainder of our information about Palaephatus corroborates the impression that our author was genuinely interested in finding out facts about the past rather than merely assembling and rewriting mythic stories about it. In addition to the Peri Apiston, Palaephatus composed a work on the geography of the Troad, Troika, which commanded sufficient authority to be cited by Demetrius of Scepsis and (through him) by Strabo (12.3.22).Footnote ²⁶ The interest in real-life geography this work implies carries over to the extant Peri Apiston. As many scholars have noted, Palaephatus frequently accounts for myths by appealing to the topography of the places in which myths are supposed to have occurred.Footnote ²⁷ In entry 16, for example, Palaephatus’ interest in the real-life geography of the Troad seems to dictate the interpretation of the myths he is analysing, rather than vice versa. In such cases, Palaephatus the geographer is indissociable from Palaephatus the rationaliser of myths.Footnote ²⁸ Viewed from the context of his wider intellectual profile, Palaephatus’ habit of citing (or even ‘inventing’) specific place names in the Peri Apiston seems less like ludic or rhetorical strategy than a reflection of his genuine interest in geography.

Of course, as Santoni and other scholars have well observed, the Peri Apiston cannot be regarded as a contribution to the historiographical knowledge of the past, above all because it fails to provide a continuous narrative of past events that is implied by this label. However, historiography was not the only form of writing about the past that flourished in the ancient world, and the systematic ordering of the Peri Apiston is therefore no barrier to its being considered a work seriously engaged with problems of historical reconstruction. Alongside the mainstream historiographical tradition exemplified in the works of Herodotus and Thucydides, there existed another form of writing – antiquarian erudition – which characteristically eschewed the historiographer’s preoccupation with political and military history and concentrated instead on accumulating recondite information regarding the customs, laws, religious practices and institutions of the archaic past.Footnote ²⁹ The key distinction between these two ‘disciplines’ lay in their alternatively narrative/systematic arrangement. As Momigliano famously observed, ‘the systematic order ultimately came to represent a major, if not the only, criterion of distinction between proper history and other research about the past’.Footnote ³⁰ Rather than providing evidence of Palaephatus’ ludic or interpretative preoccupations, the atemporal framework of the Peri Apiston speaks to its antiquarian nature.

Everything we think we know about Palaephatus – from his likely affiliations with the Lyceum and the philosophical inflectionFootnote ³¹ of the Preface to the range of antiquarian interests attributed to him in the Suda and other ancient sources – fits the antiquarian profile. Palaephatus was held to be an authority on the distant past in antiquity, and traces of an interest in ancient names, customs and inventions may be detected in several entries of our (badly mutilated and epitomised) collection.Footnote ³² Even the author’s name, itself probably adapted from a notorious Homeric idiom (ἀπὸ δρύος παλαιφάτου), appropriately speaks to his antiquarian interests.Footnote ³³ Similarly, Palaephatus’ emphasis in the Preface on the importance of ‘curiosity’ (polypragmosyne) and ‘wisdom and knowledge’ (sophia kai episteme) in the Preface and, conversely, the difficulties scholars have experienced in trying to identify the aims and purposes of his work neatly correspond to the curiosity and inconsequentiality characteristic of the antiquarian. There is even an inescapable family resemblance between Momigliano’s quest for the pure antiquarian – ‘To find him one must go into the provinces of Italy or France and be prepared to listen to lengthy explanations by old men in uncomfortably cold, dark rooms…’ – and the interviews Palaephatus claims to have conducted with local presbyteroi in the Preface.

To read the Peri Apiston as an antiquarian text fundamentally changes our understanding of the work’s aims and generic identity. As we noted above, preceding scholarship has tended to present Palaephatus as having been interested in the study of myths as stories in their own right, independently of their basis in past events. But antiquarians were above all interested in presenting their readers with accurate information about the facts – the genomena – of the past, a project which chimes with the author’s insistence on the interrelationship between legomena and genomena and (as we have observed) the value of erudition and curiosity in the Preface. Read as an antiquarian text, the Peri Apiston appears less like a work of ‘myth criticism’, let alone a parody of historiography, than as an argument for taking the claims made in corrupt, mythic records seriously, when suitably shorn of their more incredible features.

This brings us back to the identity of the two groups mentioned at the beginning of the text. Who needed to be convinced that apista legomena could be made to yield information about past genomena? What, if anything, can have been at stake in the project Palaephatus saw through in the Peri Apiston?

Myth and the marvellous

Although frequently described as a work ‘about myths’, the Peri Apiston is, strictly speaking, a text about apista or apista legomena – that is, about marvels or tales of the marvellous – even if the stories discussed in the extant entries are uniformly drawn from popular mythic stories. The theme of the fantastic immediately calls to mind paradoxography, a literary genre first attested in the same period in which the Peri Apiston was composed and whose raison d’être lay in the systematic collection, arrangement and dissemination of wonders. The marvels discussed by paradoxographers were generally biological or topological rather than mythological in kind and came from the contemporary world rather than the distant past. However, a significant degree of overlap between the two genres is demonstrated by their use of a common vocabulary and shared preoccupation with ‘incredible’ phenomena.Footnote ³⁴ At one level, the Peri Apiston may be read as a collection of marvellous tales about the distant past analogous to the paradoxographical collections of wonders drawn from the contemporary world. However, despite their shared preoccupation with apista or apista legomena, the attitude Palaephatus brought to the study of marvels was diametrically opposed to that of the paradoxographers.

The basic aim of paradoxography was to appeal to Hellenistic and Imperial readers’ taste for the marvellous, and paradoxographers accordingly tended to take on trust the accounts of prodigious events they found in the scientific and historiographical literature that furnished their primary source-material.Footnote ³⁵ Even more strikingly, paradoxographers sometimes omit the explanatory framework laid out in their sources in order to defamiliarise the relevant thaumata even further and hence increase the impression of ‘wonder’ their texts sought to inspire.Footnote ³⁶ For paradoxographers and their readers, the world was indeed full of wonders. The contrast with Palaephatus could not be more striking.

In Palaephatus’ view, the monsters or biological prodigies in which poets and paradoxographers delighted cannot have existed in the past, and the vision of the heroic age offered in the Peri Apiston is squarely commensurable with contemporary norms.Footnote ³⁷ While paradoxographers tend to omit rationalising explanations of the marvellous to make their stories more marvellous, Palaephatus takes every possible measure to transform apista into Pista legomena. In Palaephatus’ usage, an apiston legomenon is an implausible and therefore inaccurate version of events; in paradoxography, by contrast, an apiston is an ‘astounding’ phenomenon which is nevertheless real.Footnote ³⁸

A further and closely-related contrast concerns the epistemology of the two genres. Paradoxography, as we have already noted, is an expressly derivative genre, the credibility of whose information lies in the authority of the literate sources it draws upon.Footnote ³⁹ Significantly, paradoxographers never claim to have verified their sources’ information through autoptic investigation.Footnote ⁴⁰ The authority of Palaephatus’ text, by contrast, resides in the author’s claim to have first-hand experience of the places he mentions in his text and to have conducted interviews with local elders. Accordingly, he stresses the importance of polypragmosyne in the Preface, the same term which Polybius would later employ to underline the value of empirical research.Footnote ⁴¹ The image Palaephatus presents of himself as a critical and autoptic researcher conforms to the self-representation of historiographical and geographical authors such as Polybius and Strabo, who loudly criticised earlier writers for relying exclusively on written accounts and for taking reports of incredible happenings at face value.Footnote ⁴² In emphasising – indeed exaggerating – the extent of his autopsy, Palaephatus was implicitly aligning himself with the epistemic values adopted by mainstream historiographical and geographical tradition.Footnote ⁴³

The overtly rationalising approach Palaephatus adopts to stories of the marvellous furnishes valuable clues as to the intended aims and readership of the work. In composing a text which in its terminology and organisation so closely recalled the works of paradoxographers, Palaephatus presumably intended to reach much the same readership as enjoyed the genre of paradoxography. On the other hand, his insistence on the importance of adopting a critical approach to stories of the marvellous may be read as a more or less overt attack on the credulity of paradoxographers and their readers.Footnote ⁴⁴ A plausible candidate for the first group of thinkers mentioned in the Preface of the Peri Apiston – readers incapable of questioning the accuracy of the legomena reported to them – is thus the original readership of paradoxographical literature. This brings us to the second group, who suffered from the opposite epistemic vice of being excessively sceptical of the truth-value of incredible tales. Whom might this description have referred to?

As we noted above, the author of the Peri Apiston presents his activities as continuous with mainstream historiographical tradition, especially as exemplified in the work of Thucydides. The first logographers and historical writers, such as Hecataeus of Miletus and Acusilaus of Argos, treated the whole span of human history within their works, rationalising whatever aspects of mythic narratives seemed ‘laughable’ or implausible to them. However, following Herodotus and especially Thucydides, works of ‘classic’ historiography tended to eschew discussion of those distant periods of the past for which myths were the only available evidence ‘on account of the difficulty’ (διὰ τὴν δυσχέρειαν) of the issues involved, as Diodorus Siculus put it.Footnote ⁴⁵ A distinction between ‘mythic’ and ‘human’ history thus became central to the distinction between historiographical and antiquarian research.Footnote ⁴⁶ Like tales of the marvellous, which prompted similar invectives on the part of historiographers and geographers, myths and other apista legomena were – in theory – excluded from the realm of historiography proper.Footnote ⁴⁷

Philosophers, too, sometimes denied the historical authority of myths. In Plato’s Critias,Footnote ⁴⁸ Critias argues that that while the names of mythic heroes had indeed belonged to people from the past, the logoi about them had developed independently of past events and were therefore devoid of historical content. In Phaedrus, the Platonic Socrates suggested that myths were never expected to offer believable accounts of past events and hence could not be made to yield credible historical information, even when appropriately rationalised.Footnote ⁴⁹ Socrates’ comment in Timaeus that myths about the gods were not to be disbelieved (apistein) implies a similar reflection: since the accuracy of these stories could not be empirically verified or corroborated by appeal to criteria such as plausibility or logical necessity, their traditional authority could not be called into question, but they could not furnish plausible accounts of the past either.Footnote ⁵⁰ There was thus both significant historiographical and philosophical precedent for the view that apista legomena such as myths and tales of wonders lacked authority as records of current or past events or phenomena.

Palaephatus was certainly aware of these criticisms. Thus in the Preface he alludes to the very passage in which Thucydides had declared that certain periods of the past lay beyond investigation (ἀνεξέλεγκτα) owing to the elapse of time, the impossibility of carrying out first-personal enquiry and the embellishments of poets and logographers.Footnote ⁵¹ In evoking this passage, Palaephatus aligned himself with the historiographer’s criticism of the marvellous stories recounted by poets and logographers. But he can also plausibly be read as signalling that Thucydides’ overt disapproval of the analysis of mythic evidence and apista legomena numbered among the attitudes he sought to refute in the Peri Apiston. Indeed, it is significant that the terminology of apista/apistia invoked by Palaephatus was frequently used in the historiographical tradition to refer to the kind of stories which were prima facie excluded from historiographical treatment or were considered anti-historiographical in character.Footnote ⁵²

Again, there is strong evidence that Palaephatus was cognisant of philosophical critiques of regarding myths as historical sources. Van den Berg has convincingly argued that Palaephatus’ denial of the existence of purely fictional accounts of the past was intended as a counter-argument to Plato’s suggestion in Critias that heroic myths were devoid of historical content since they were fabricated out of pre-existing names:Footnote ⁵³ οὐ γὰρ ὀνόματα μόνον ἐγένοντο, λόγος δὲ περὶ αὐτῶν οὐδεὶς ὑπῆρξεν· ἀλλὰ πρότερον ἐγένετο τὸ ἔργον, εἶθ’ οὕτως ὁ λόγος ὁ περὶ αὐτῶν (‘for names did not exist on their own, without any [corresponding] speech concerning them; rather, first there was the deed, then a speech thus [arose] concerning them’). Likewise, scholars have uniformly accepted that some kind of relationship, however mediated, exists between Palaephatus’ text and Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates suggests that myths lack the historical credentials which contemporary sophoi implicitly attributed to them.Footnote ⁵⁴

Given Palaephatus’ awareness of historiographical and philosophical controversy regarding the epistemic authority of mythic tales and his decision to give his work a title which touched on the very heart of these debates, it seems likely that the Peri Apiston was intended, at least in part, as an attempt to re-establish the intellectual credibility of apista legomena as records. Palaephatus may even have composed the work in order to reintegrate the systematic study of discrete facts about the distant past within a historiographical tradition which, following Thucydides, was increasingly hostile to it.Footnote ⁵⁵ There is thus a plausible case for identifying the extreme sceptics of myth mentioned in the Preface with those historiographical, philosophical and geographical authors who tended to deny that mythic tales or stories of prodigious creatures possessed any significant factual value.Footnote ⁵⁶

On this reading, Palaephatus’ aim in writing the Peri Apiston was to define and exemplify the correct attitude to be taken regarding stories of the marvellous, an attitude the author found sorely lacking in the readers of paradoxography and historiographical writers who formed his intended audience. A reader interested in paradoxography will initially have interpreted the work’s title as promising yet another account of the world’s marvels: ‘Concerning Marvels’ or ‘Concerning tales of extraordinary phenomena’, ‘Things that you won’t believe – but you should’, ‘Stories that will keep you amazed’. For historiographers, by contrast, the same words will come freighted with alarming implications: ‘Stories that can’t be true’, ‘Fake news – debunked’, ‘Far-fetched claims’, ‘On frauds’, ‘Concerning bogus or sham tales’. Palaephatus, as we have seen, sought to steer a middle course between both these positions. His choice of a title which so neatly identifies the issue on which he distinguished his own views from those of his contemporaries therefore seems especially significant.

As scholars have rightly noted, Palaephatus also seems to have been interested in the stories he discusses as stories and not just as test cases for his thesis about the (qualified) reliability of myths and other apista legomena. This is doubtless why Palaephatus discusses so many apista in the work, why the format of the Peri Apiston recalls the itemised lists of paradoxographical collections so closely and why the author’s analyses rarely recover information of genuine cultural or historiographical significance about the distant past. Grafted onto the mythographic and quasi-paradoxographical dimensions of the text, however, was a far more ambitious and serious-minded attempt to demonstrate that evidence which had traditionally been excluded from mainstream historiography, geography and philosophy should be considered as imperfect but nevertheless legitimate sources of information regarding past events. Like the paradoxographical texts to which his own work may be compared, the Peri Apiston was ultimately not ‘literature about literature, but literature about the (sublunary) world’.Footnote ⁵⁷

The central challenge for scholars of Palaephatus lies, in fact, in finding the right balance between the various components of the text’s intellectual identity – antiquarian, paradoxographical, historiographical, epistemological, mythographic – and in offering an account that clarifies as far as possible the relations between these competing interests without eliminating the undeniable tension which persists. The aim of the preceding discussion has been to redress the balance of preceding scholarship by showing that Palaephatus’ claim to have rationalised apista into Pista legomena would not have seemed so far-fetched (or, more charitably, ludic) to an ancient reader as it naturally appears to us, and to highlight that the evidential value of apista legomena was a topic of serious debate in antiquity rather than merely a peg on which the author could hang a series of dazzling solutions to problems posed by myths.

However, while I have argued that Palaephatus’ interest in apista legomena as problematic sources ultimately outweighed his concern with them as engaging and significant narratives, I do not wish to deny the ludic and rhetorical aspects of the text altogether. The task for scholars of the Peri Apiston must be to re-enter a world where the intellectual identity of historiography and geography, and their relations with poetry and myth, were far from settled. We will only understand Palaephatus’ text if we acknowledge both its serious, epistemological and its ludic, rhetorical and mythographic dimensions. To regard the Peri Apiston as a playful parody of historiography or as an exercise in myth interpretation is to cut the Gordian Knot; it is only when we recognise that the study of myths as evidence and the interpretation of myths as stories were not mutually exclusive alternatives that the work of interpretation begins.