Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Greek Novel

Abstract

This book is about Egypt, ancient Ethiopia (a territory located in modern Sudan, known to ancient Egyptians as Kush and modern specialists as Nubia), and the ancient Greek romance novels. Of the five Greek novels that survive in their entirety, Egypt and/or Ethiopia play an important role in four: Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe (first century ce), Xenophon of Ephesus’ An Ephesian Tale (first/second century ce), Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (second century ce), and Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Story (third or fourth century ce). Employing approaches from literary studies, Classics, and Egyptology, the book’s argument turns on two concepts: representation and resistance. On the one hand, it demonstrates that the novels develop an image of Egypt and Ethiopia that is in close dialogue with Greco-Roman ethnographic tradition. On the other, it argues that this depiction regularly figures Egypt and Ethiopia as sites of resistance, revolt, and rebellion against—and also political, cultural, and religious alternatives to—a series of dominant imperial powers in the region, from the Persians to the Romans. This argument enriches our understanding of the texts’ relationship with the real and imagined frontiers of Roman political, military, and intellectual power. Further, it raises literary and cultural historical questions about the interrelation of humans and their environment and what we might call, after Simon Schama, the topographies of cultural identity in the Roman Empire.