La plus belle des histoires" Grotius' Drama on Joseph in Egypt in the Tradition of the Theme ARTHUR EYFFINGER "La plus belle des histoires", the fairest of all stories. The words are taken from the Koran, the twelfth sura and introduce the story of Joseph the Patriarch. 1 Few tales have broken their way into as many cultures as did the story of Joseph. And few can claim to have appealed, through the ages, to as many artists in both the literary and the visual arts. The theme of Jacob's dearest son has captivated such various talents as Firdousi and Vondel, Macropedius and Thomas Mann, Ghiberti and Rembrandt. The story of Joseph's life has been sung in epics and hymns, included in a triptych of plays, and presented in a sequence of novels. It has been depicted on frescoes in the Roman catacombs, on the mosaics of San Marco, in the wood of the Maximian~cathedra at Ravenna. It inspired the miniaturists of a Viennese manuscript, was embroidered in Coptic hangings, chased in the baptistry at Florence, vitrified in Chartres, petrified in Vezelay and carved into ivory at Sens. 2 Clearly, the spell of the Genesis narrative accounts for many of these artistic outpourings. Man has always been fascinated by the tragedy of the pit at Dothan, the seduction scene with the wife of Potiphar, the wronged innocence, the prophecies from the dungeon, the love-story with fair Asnethe and the reconciliation of the brothers at Memphis. Or, as Goethe puts it in Dichtung und Wahrheit (1.4): "Hochst anmutig ist diese natiirliche Erzahlung, nur erscheint sie zu kurz, und man ruhlt sich berufen, sie ins Einzelne auszumalen."3 And so the artists did. They stressed the esthetic element, as did Firdousi who transformed the sobre and austere narrative of the Koran into a heroic epic Yusuf and Zuleicha, or the ancient Jewish author from Egyptian 1 Sura 12.3.