The Greek Ephemeris and Dictys' Phoenician text: fictions of the past, present and future

It is clear from the Latin prologue that not only the letters (litterae) but also the very language (uox) of Dictys' Ur-text is Phoenician, and the text requires wholesale translation into Greek language (Graecus sermo) at Nero's command. This is consistent with what we know about the version of the earlier Greek Ephemeris, which dates to the late second century, too. Our knowledge of the Greek Ephemeris is based largely on the reports of Byzantine sources which do not provide precise details about the language or script in which the putative Ur-text was written; however, they confirm that the Greek Ephemeris followed the Latin prologue inasmuch as Dictys' original journal had to undergo ‘translation’ or ‘transcription’ (μεταγραφῆναι) at the hands of the Roman emperor.Footnote ⁶ More direct evidence is provided by the recently discovered papyrus fragment POxy. 4944, which corresponds to the text of our Latin Eph. 5.17, and which suggests that, in the Greek Ephemeris, Dictys is claimed to have written using not only Phoenician letters, ‘the letters of Cadmus and Danaus’, but in Phoenician language as well:

Although the fragment does not state explicitly that Dictys originally wrote in the Phoenician language, this is to be inferred from his emphasis on the multiplicity of languages which were used at the time by both barbarians and Greeks alike. What Dictys is trying to account for here is his bilingualism, which he explains in terms of the Babelic profusion of languages and dialects that prevailed in the Mediterranean at the time.Footnote ⁸ Our evidence therefore suggests that, in the Greek Ephemeris as well as in the Latin prologue, readers are to imagine that Dictys' Ur-text was written in Phoenician language as well as Phoenician letters. Given the fragmented linguistic background which the author emphasises, readers are invited to speculate that Phoenician was the lingua franca at that time, and that writing in Phoenician language was a strategy to ensure the Ephemeris' reach and survival beyond the parochial limitations of the Greek language, similar (we may speculate) to the medieval practice of writing literary texts in Latin rather than in the thriving but heterogeneous romance languages. This suggests that Idomeneus and Meriones, Dictys' patrons (Prol. 4–7), aspired to create a monumental historical record of the Trojan War, which could reach beyond its local Cretan audience.

This fascinating fiction of a bilingual author writing in the remote past must have resonated in a particular way with authors and readers of the Roman Empire who, like Dictys, frequently had to negotiate between at least two languages, Greek and Latin.Footnote ⁹ We know of several bicultural and bilingual authors from the mid-first to late second century, some of whom would have been active when the Greek Ephemeris was first in circulation and may even have read the text itself.Footnote ¹⁰ Philo of Byblos, author of the Phoenician history in the mid-first century, claimed to have translated the works of an ancient Phoenician scribe Sanchuniathon – presenting himself, implicitly, as a bilingual scholar and a purveyor of Phoenician wisdom to Greek readers.Footnote ¹¹ In the second century, Apuleius, who was born in the African town of Madauros and educated at Carthage, a city of Punic origin, wrote in both Greek and Latin. The prologue to his novel Metamorphoses speaks explicitly about his diligent studies in Latin and his switch from one language to the other – in this case, to rewrite a version of the Greek ass-story in Latin (Met. 1.1.4–5). This interplay of cultural identities is itself an important theme in Apuleius' fiction.Footnote ¹² Another contemporary author to speak explicitly about his cultural bifocality as a native Syrian with a Greek education is Lucian of Samosata, who wrote prolifically in Greek but whose native language was probably Aramaic.Footnote ¹³ More spectacularly, Iamblichus, author of the Greek novel Babylonian tales, asserted that he was a native Syrian who had received a Babylonian education and later acquired proficiency in Greek. Whether Iamblichus spoke in the novel as its historical author or as a fictive authorial persona is immaterial: this chameleon-like cultural plasticity, be it fact or fictional strategy, was intended to be believable and to enhance the reading experience by authenticating the narrative as well as imbuing it with the perfume of the exotic and the arcane.Footnote ¹⁴ For readers and authors of the imperial era, the fictional ancient author Dictys, a Greek who was educated and wrote in Phoenician, must have held a particular appeal: Dictys was a vivid dramatisation, in the heroic past, of the realities of their own contemporary literary and cultural milieu.Footnote ¹⁵ This should hardly be surprising; after all, Dictys was ostensibly replacing the poet Homer as the earliest witness of the Trojan War, and it was common practice for subsequent generations of authors, however playfully, to refashion Homer in their own image – giving us, for example, a Homer the Babylonian.Footnote ¹⁶ By a reversal of this logic, the peculiar concentration of historical Greek-speaking Syrian counterparts for Dictys in the imperial era (Lucian, Iamblichus, Philo) raises the intriguing – albeit thoroughly unprovable – possibility that the Dictys author was him- or herself a Greek-speaking Syrian as well, who fashioned this fictional avatar in his or her own image. Gainsford makes the same suggestion on the slightly stronger basis that so many later authors who actually cite or refer to Dictys were themselves Syrian, e.g. Lucian, John Malalas, John of Antioch and the Antiochene historian Domninos.Footnote ¹⁷

Speculation aside, the Dictys fiction can tell us nothing about the historical author who lurks behind him, but it can provide for us tantalising glimpses into contemporary readers' fantasies about their past, present and future. If an analogy is felt to exist between Dictys' putative use of Phoenician as a lingua franca in the heroic past and the text's translation into Greek, the new lingua franca in the imperial period, then it follows inevitably that the Dictys fiction must also accommodate the fantasy of its own future illegibility as a Greek text, too: a time when, ages hence, it will again require specialists to decipher what was written in a language and script that was once universally understood, and the text will undergo translation yet again – not only as it had done (fictionally) from Phoenician into Greek, but also as it did in actual reality from Greek into Latin and thence into modern European languages. In other words, the text's own fiction of translation pre-empts its reality as a translated text. In the same way, we can read the fictional mutations of its physical form in the past – from Dictys' humble tablets of linden-wood to (presumably) the papyrus scrolls in Nero's library – as a premonition, however unconscious, of subsequent actual transformations of the text as it continually adapts to new communities of readers: from scroll to codex to books of paper and even into digital text. By inscribing a story of its own origins and posterity into its fabula de se, the fiction appears constantly to pre-empt the reality of its own ever-changing reading-contexts and to become, by a mercurial magic, a partial reality for its readers, ancient and modern.

Septimius' Latin Journal and Dictys' Punico-Greek text

In the letter which prefaces the later Latin version of the text, Septimius, the Latin translator and editor, claims that Dictys wrote originally using ‘Punic letters’, but that his language was Greek:

Here the Journal undergoes only one linguistic transformation, rather than two: from Dictys' original Greek into Septimius' Latin. Dictys' Phoenician-language text seems to have disappeared altogether. Evidently an ancient Greek Ur-text was adequate for the Latin Journal's pseudo-documentary needs. It has also been suggested that Septimius effaced the additional linguistic layer in order to protect the text's credibility and fantasy of authenticity: perhaps two layers of translation were felt to be a bridge too far.Footnote ¹⁸ It is possible that, for Roman readers, the Phoenician or, in the more polemical term used by Septimius, Punic original was tainted with connotations of deception, treachery and hostility which the Phoenician text would not have presented quite so vividly for readers of the Greek. Septimius may therefore have deemed it desirable, for the benefit of his Roman readers, to replace Dictys' Phoenician original with the culturally more palatable Greek version. But in that case, why not expunge the Journal's distasteful Punic pedigree entirely? It seems puzzling that Septimius should jettison the Phoenician language Ur-text, yet retain the fiction of its Phoenician writing. Possibly these letters represent merely a vestigial trace of Dictys' Phoenician journal, an anomalous fossil left over in the process of Septimius' compression of the Ephemeris' more complex fiction. But, as Gainsford has recently pointed out, this makes for an intrinsically implausible fiction: Phoenician and Punic scripts lack vowels, which makes them poorly suited to represent Greek.Footnote ¹⁹ Were readers of this carefully crafted fiction really meant to be persuaded by such an incongruously hybrid text?

There is another possibility which has not, to my knowledge, been canvassed before now: that Septimius' ‘Punic letters’ represented not the Phoenician alphabet, but a primitive form of writing in Greek. As I have argued in greater detail elsewhere, there are cogent reasons why an author who is trying to conjure up a plausible image of a text from this very early period might choose for it an alphabet other than Greek. Dictys supposedly wrote his Journal at the time of the Trojan War, at a time when Greek literacy was believed to be in its infancy, if born at all.Footnote ²⁰ He was therefore more likely to be using one of the writing-systems from which the Greek alphabet itself was thought to have evolved, such as Phoenician.Footnote ²¹ Even the Greek heroes within the story-world use ‘Punic letters’ to write their voting-tablets.Footnote ²² The fantasy of obscure writing not only enhanced the arcane and intriguing mystique surrounding the text; it also authenticated the fiction of that text's antiquity. It was characteristic of authors of pseudo-documentary texts to exploit ancient theories about the origins and development of the Greek alphabet for precisely these reasons, and Dictys' Phoenician writing had many parallels in the field of Trojan War literature and the magico-scientific treatise, both of which had origins in the Hellenistic world. In the preface to the first book of the magico-medical treatise Kyranides, for instance, ‘Harpokration’ claims he discovered the text during his travels: it took the form of an inscription in ‘Syriac letters’, which was translated for him by an obliging old man, a Syrian and a former prisoner of war who was proficient in Greek as well as the local language.Footnote ²³ The putative Ur-text underlying the astral-herbal treatise Compounds attributed to Democritus (but commonly believed in antiquity to be the work of Bolus of Mendes) was a composite of the learned writings of Apollobex of Coptos, an Egyptian sage, and Dardanus of Phoenicia which were presumably to be imagined as texts written in those authors' languages; Democritus allegedly discovered these texts in the tomb of Phoenician Dardanus himself.Footnote ²⁴ Equally fictional is Clement of Alexandria's claim that Democritus appropriated a Babylonian text, a translation of an inscription on the pillar of Achiqar, which he assimilated to his own work on ethics.Footnote ²⁵ In the Trojan oration, Dio claims to have discovered a narrative about the Trojan War which survived in Egyptian inscriptions which were interpreted for him by an aged Egyptian priest.Footnote ²⁶ And also in the first century, Philo of Byblos, as we have already seen, claimed to have based his Phoenician history, a Phoenician cosmogony and theology which was intended to compete with Hesiod, on the writings of the ancient Phoenician scribe, Sanchuniathon of Beirut.Footnote ²⁷ It is very likely that the author of the Dictys-text invented his or her Phoenician Ur-text following the example of such texts as these from the hinterland of scholarly literature.

There is, however, a more precise precedent for Dictys' ‘Phoenician’ or ‘Punic’ letters in the ancient Troy-history of Dionysius Scytobrachion, a grammatikos in Alexandria in Egypt in the mid third century BCE.Footnote ²⁸ Dionysius was the prolific author of a cycle of narratives about the Argonauts, the Amazons, the god Dionysus, as well as a history of the Trojan War itself. He claimed to have based these stories on the written works of more ancient mythographers and poets,Footnote ²⁹ in particular the pre-Homeric Greek poet Linus and Thymoetes, a Trojan prince and a contemporary of Orpheus who had visited Nysa, the island of Dionysus, where he learned an account about the god which he then recorded in a work called Phrygia, using an ‘archaic dialect and script’, probably indicating the Phrygian language itself.Footnote ³⁰ This detail is recorded by Diodorus within a longer excursus about the origins and development of Greek alphabetic writing from Dionysius' work. According to Diodorus, Dionysius recorded that the Phoenician immigrant Cadmus was first to introduce the technology of writing to the Greeks. This primitive Cadmean alphabet was adapted to the Greek language by the poet Linus (one of Dionysius' putative sources), who assigned each letter its name and established the shape of each.Footnote ³¹ These became known commonly (κοινῇ) as ‘Phoenician letters’ on account of their Phoenician origin, but were privately (ἰδίᾳ) called ‘Pelasgic letters’ as the Pelasgian Greeks were the first to make use of the adapted script.Footnote ³² According to Dionysius, Linus himself wrote about the exploits of the god Dionysus and other myths using these Pelasgic letters and left his work in the form of ‘notebooks’ (hypomnēmata); other early Greek writers such as Orpheus and Pronapides (Homer's tutor) used the new letters too. Dionysius' imaginary palaio-literary landscape was therefore generously littered with Greek texts written in these so-called ‘Phoenician’ or ‘Pelasgic letters’ which the scholar seems to have taken some trouble to accommodate to the Greek alphabet, probably influenced by Herodotus' similar account about the ‘Cadmean letters’ of the ancient inscriptions which he saw in Thebes (Hdt. 5. 58–61). For Dionysius' authenticating purposes, these ‘Phoenician letters’ conjured up a plausible image of a text from this very early phase of the Greek alphabet's development, whilst his learned excursus on early Greek writing embedded his pseudo-documentary history into the context of contemporary theories on the origins of Greek literacy in an explicitly scholarly manner. I would like to consider the possibility that the author of the Dictys-text knew Dionysius Scytobrachion's work, and that the ‘Phoenician letters’ of Dictys' Ur-text could therefore have represented, not just the letters of the Phoenician alphabet (as in the Ur-text envisaged in the Greek Ephemeris), but also the newly adapted letters of proto-Greek which needed only to be transcribed into the more familiar forms of the Attic alphabet, as Septimius himself describes in his letter prefacing the Journal.

In all of the critical passages of the Dictys-text where the issue of the Ur-text's language is raised, the author emphatically asserts that the ‘Phoenician letters’ used by Dictys had been introduced to Greece by the Phoenician immigrant Cadmus, either alone or with the help of varying partners.Footnote ³³ In his letter, Septimius more precisely states that Dictys used ‘the Punic letters which were in widespread use throughout Greece at that time, having been introduced by Cadmus and Agenor’.Footnote ³⁴ Notably, the structure of Septimius' sentence envisages a graduated process of language dissemination where the new letters are first introduced (ablative absolute: Cadmo et Agenore auctoribus) and thereafter spread and become naturalised (imperfect tense: tum … frequentebantur). Septimius is pointedly closer here to Dionysius Scytobrachion's careful account of the incremental dissemination of Cadmus' alphabet throughout Greece, than the passing references in the Greek Ephemeris where the initial introduction of the letters is mentioned only.

Septimius' attribution of the new ‘Punic letters’ to Agenor as well as Cadmus is a curious detail. In mythology Agenor, who was either the father or brother of Cadmus, was one of the founders of the royal house of Thebes and an ancestor of the god Dionysus who is a central figure of interest in Dionysius' work. Agenor's presence in Septimius' text therefore marginally increases the potential for a connection with Dionysius' interests. Another shared interest, coincidentally, is the Amazons, who are a major feature in Dionysius' work and also play a role in the reported action in the Journal (3.15 and 4.2), although the primary source in this case is far more likely to be the epic cycle. More compellingly, however, the name of one of Dionysius' putative sources, Thymoetes, appears in Septimius' Journal too: at 4.22 ‘Timoetes’ is identified as the son of Laomedon and brother of Priam, and therefore a Trojan prince. According to Dionysius, his source Thymoetes was the homonymous son of this Trojan prince.Footnote ³⁵ Moreover, Dionysius and Septimius are the only two authors in antiquity, as far as our evidence shows, to make Thymoetes a brother of Priam.

Admittedly, it requires the eye of faith to see among these wisps of detail convincing evidence for a connection between these two texts. But it is not, after all, improbable that the author of Dictys' history of the Trojan War should, in the course of his or her research, have consulted Dionysius' ancient Trojan history. On the basis of our current evidence, we cannot know if the author of the Greek Ephemeris had read Dionysius in the second century CE, and if Septimius derived his knowledge of Dionysius indirectly through that earlier author. Diodorus was clearly reading Dionysius in the first century BCE, and there is evidence to suggest that he was known also to Strabo in the early first century CE.Footnote ³⁶ Dionysius may well have inspired the Dictys-author with the pseudo-documentary infrastructure of his work, and his euhemerising influence may also account partially for the diminished role of the gods in Dictys' account of the war as well as for his rationalised version of Odysseus' adventures en route home (6.5–6), which contrasts so starkly with the fabulous Homeric narrative.Footnote ³⁷ Both authors of pseudo-documentary Trojan-histories are also working within the same framework of theories about the origins of the Greek alphabet.

If this suggestion is right, it opens up the possibility that the Ur-text which Septimius envisaged was a primitive Greek artefact, rather than a hybrid of Greek language in Phoenician script, which is a much more plausible fiction. Reading the Dictys-text alongside Dionysius' work enables us to situate Dictys in a clearer literary-scholarly landscape. Instead of an isolated pioneer at the frontiers of Greek literacy, ‘Dictys’ can now be assimilated in the reader's imagination into a constellation of other putative pre-Homeric writers who populate Dionysius' text, such as Linus, Pronapides and Orpheus, all of whom also exploited ‘Phoenician letters’, a primitive Greek alphabet, in order to write their records about Libya, Dionysus and Troy.

The term ‘journal’ (ephēmeris) which is used to describe Dictys' account of the Trojan War can suggest a bare-bones account, a rough ‘draft’ which was destined to be fleshed out and polished at a later stage, or an official ‘diary’, such as those mentioned by Plutarch in his Life of Alexander.Footnote ³⁸ This aligns Dictys' Journal particularly with Linus' mythographical works which are described by Dionysius as ‘notebooks’ (hypomnēmata), a term which represents texts of a similar status. These terms hint – archly – that Dictys' Ur-text, like Linus', was a raw material to be used as the basis for more detailed and embellished versions, possibly by successors such as Dionysius Scytobrachion or the Latin editor and translator Septimius himself. Dictys' assimilation to Dionysius' cast of pre-Homeric writers (in particular Homer's tutor Pronapides) also enhances the Journal's fiction of anteriority to the Homeric poems: Dictys now appears to belong to a tradition of scholars and literary artists who not only preceded but even directly influenced the great father-poet. In this paradoxical fiction, Dictys' Journal now represents the Ur-text to subsequent literary traditions about the Trojan War heroes, including Homer's own. This is precisely the idea expressed by one Byzantine reader of the Journal when he asserts that ‘Homer paraphrased the Iliad from this author [Dictys]’.Footnote ³⁹

To conclude: the two versions of Dictys' Ur-text imagined in the prologue and letter which preface our Latin text can be understood as the text's changing pseudo-documentary fantasies of its own origins at different stages of its evolution, from the Greek version of the second century CE (with its Phoenician Ur-text) to the later Latin version (with its Ur-text in Greek). The one curious constant in this mutable textual fantasy is the detail about ‘Phoenician letters’. These ‘Phoenician letters’ enhance the recherché allure of Dictys' imaginary text in a way that is characteristic of ancient scholarly literature, as well as its off-shoot, pseudo-documentary fiction. They serve to authenticate the existence of a text of Greek literature in this very early period of Greek literacy by appealing to ancient scholarly theories about the development of the Greek alphabet, for which there is a direct parallel in the work of the Hellenistic pseudepigrapher Dionysius Scytobrachion, who expatiates on the alphabet's evolution in an unusually detailed and explicit manner. Dionysius' work, in turn, opens up the possibility that readers understood Dictys to be writing in a form of proto-Greek writing, and also provides an expansive imaginary backdrop for the literary soldier Dictys and his Trojan War text. Read in conjunction with Dionysius, Dictys of Crete now appears to belong to a coterie of pre-Homeric writers, most of whom used the ‘Phoenician letters’ of Cadmus to write the first, virgin compositions in the prestigious history of Greek literature, giving Dictys a genealogy which enhances the post-Classical fantasy that Homer's epics were descendants of a Cretan soldier's text.