There are a few things to be done before the stories can begin. A slave must fetch a jug of water and pour it into a silver basin. The visitors shall wash their hands. A table is to be pulled up beside them and laid with bread and meat. Everyone shall eat and drink until they’re full. Then, and only then, will the hosts ask the guests about themselves. Who are they? Where have they come from? What is their story?
When I read Homer’s Odyssey for the first time, more than twenty years ago, what struck me most was how trusting people could be. The most civilized characters in the poem welcome strangers into their homes before they know so much as their names. As a child I found this extremely worrying. What if they were thieves? What if they were murderers? What if they ate all the bread and left their hosts wanting? Students of Homer are taught that such generosity is in keeping with established laws of hospitality: treat strangers as if they are your friends. But over the years I’ve come to see these acts as also redolent of the fact that the Greeks considered a good story worth waiting for. The bread-and-basin rituals outlined above usually serve as a prelude to storytelling. Odysseus, tossed across the sea after his raft is shattered in a sea-storm, washes up on an island called Scheria, where he is welcomed into a royal palace, fed, and prompted to speak. Relieved that he has finally reached civilization, he settles in to tell his hosts of the terrifying beings he has encountered on his journey home from Troy: one-eyed Cyclopes and singing Sirens, sleepy Lotus-Eaters and cannibalistic Laestrygonians, tricksy temptresses Circe and Calypso, the whims of tempestuous gods.
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are at once products and celebrations of a history of storytelling. Two of the oldest works of literature from the Western world, they were passed down orally before being written down in the late eighth or early seventh century BC, and continued to be performed down the centuries. It was in the course of assembling this anthology that I came to appreciate just how richly layered with stories they are. The Odyssey gives us stories as told by Odysseus, stories sung to Odysseus, stories told of Odysseus as he wends his way home to Ithaca. Many of the men who fight at Troy in the Iliad are skilled tellers of tales, not least of all Achilles, the mightiest fighter for the Greeks.
The richness and variety of Homer’s storytelling were my inspiration as I set about compiling this collection of tales from antiquity. Homer marks the beginning but is also the thread that runs through so much of the literature of Greece and Rome, from the ‘Epic Cycle’ of poems which developed in his wake to provide continuations of his stories, to the tragedies of fifth-century BC Greece, and the poetry of the Roman Empire. Time and again classical authors challenged themselves to explore what became of Homer’s heroes after the Trojan War. It is partly as a result of this that ancient stories are seldom self-contained. Sharing common roots, such as Homer or the myths of his near contemporary, a poet from central Greece named Hesiod, they frequently weave into and out of each other like trees in a forest. A great number of the stories included in this anthology collide and overlap, even when separated by hundreds of years.
One of the things that makes ancient tales so mesmerizing is the possibility that they were founded in reality – or at least contain a kernel of truth. When stories are as old as the ones in this collection it feels only natural to imagine the scenarios that might have inspired them. Did anything like the Trojan War take place? Was there ever a man who unwittingly fell in love with his own mother, as Oedipus did in Greek tragedy? So many characters seem thrillingly real. We cannot help but feel Oedipus’ pain in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex, as he begins to comprehend who he really is. When a drunk man suggests to him that his father is not really his father, Oedipus questions his parents: ‘They were indignant at the taunt and that comforted me – and yet the man’s words rankled’. The line, elegantly rendered by W. B. Yeats, captures an important moment in Oedipus’ journey of self-discovery. The Oedipus story is dire and extreme but strangely relatable.
The line between story and history was frequently indeterminate. Ancient history books brim with accounts which are, to our eyes, patently mythical. Herodotus, a writer born in Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum in Turkey) in the fifth century BC, earned the sobriquet ‘Father of History’ for his celebrated Histories of Greece’s wars with Persia in spite of his numerous flights of fancy. Herodotus wove into his accounts what was known in Greek as ‘logoi’ – stories, spoken things, words which might be fictional or might equally be factual. While there is no doubt that the Persian Wars took place, and that much of what Herodotus wrote of them is true, there are also passages in his books which read like pure fiction. Inspired by Herodotus, I have included in this anthology a number of stories from the ancient history books, regardless of whether they are wholly or only partially fictional. It can be so difficult to separate fact from fiction that there is much to be said for enjoying passages in these books on their own terms as vivid stories.
The Romans were particularly partial to this blending of history and story as they sought to establish their own place in the world. In order to trace the origins of their people to the heroes of Homer’s epics, they developed the myth that Aeneas, one of the Trojans who fought in the Iliad, had led a band of refugees free from burning Troy to found a new home in Italy. The Aeneid, a Latin epic by the poet Virgil, provided the Romans with an exciting foundation story. Even Roman historians such as Livy were willing to incorporate it into their accounts of Rome’s past. Such was the power of the story.
Myth, the basis for much storytelling, was the common language through which the ancients defined themselves. Even scientists who rejected myths and the gods who populated them found that they were a useful means of communicating their ideas. Lucretius, a Roman philosopher and atomicist of the first century BC, drew on stories surrounding the love goddess Venus to explain his theories of genesis on earth. The ideas in his account are very different from those proffered by Hesiod in the seventh century BC, but the mythology surrounding Venus provided a link between ancient Greece and late-Republican Rome.
We speak of ‘The Greeks and Romans’ even though the Greek and Roman world extended far beyond Greece and Rome. I hope this anthology will reveal something of its scale. Included are stories by authors from Alexandria and Panopolis (Akhmim) in Egypt, Carthage and Libya in North Africa, Samosata (Samsat), Smyrna (İzmir) and Halicarnassus (Bodrum) in what is now Turkey, Lesbos, Rhodes and Sicily, and an account by the Jewish historian Josephus, who defected to the Romans in the Jewish War of the first century AD. I’ve frequently broken the chronological arrangement of the stories in this anthology in order to reflect the development of themes between authors across time and space. The superiority of the countryside over the city, for instance, is a theme that occupies the fables of Aesop, who is thought to have been born in the sixth century BC, a second-century BC comedy by a Carthage-born former slave, and the Latin poetry of Horace.
The two youngest stories in this collection sit on the cusp of a new world. One is taken from the rather saucy mid-sixth-century AD Secret History by an historian named Procopius. The other comes from the Consolation of Boethius, who was born in Rome at around the same time the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed. These texts, though written by Christians, are still pagan enough to warrant a place in a collection of classical literature. For Boethius, in particular, it was almost a case of clinging on to the achievements of classicism lest they fell with Rome itself.
This anthology features many of the celebrated writers of Greece and Rome – but not every single one of them. My guiding principle has been to select from only such works as provide interesting and arresting stories. Classical literature, it must be said, requires us to widen our expectations of what a story is. The short story, for instance, was not a genre the Greeks and Romans recognised. Even the novel was a late development and comparatively rare. Far more common was literature written in dialogue form: tragedies, comedies, philosophical discussions, legal speeches, all of which typically extended to thousands of lines. This means that, while this anthology contains a number of complete, standalone stories, it also features plenty of extracts from longer works, some of which conform more readily than others to what we may imagine a ‘story’ to be.
Every piece of literature is different and demands its own treatment. I found that an ancient novel, for example, can be précised in a series of episodes. A speech in a play often tells a story in itself; it can hold its own. A section of dialogue can provide a window onto a longer tale. I have also selected a few stories from ancient books of myths told in summary. These are typically very short. Extracting from something longer, such as the Aeneid or Argonautica – an epic tale of Jason and the Argonauts – has its challenges, but I have tried through my selections to give a flavour of the whole. I decided not to include fragments from ancient anthologies and the Greek lyric poets on the grounds that they seldom of themselves tell satisfyingly complete or accessible stories, but broke my own rules on a couple of occasions, primarily to give a taste of some of the women writers of antiquity. So little of their work survives that a fragmentary poem by Sappho, while not possessed of the liveliest story, is the more tantalizing for its rarity.
The principal joy of working on this anthology has been the opportunity to read the breadth of Greek and Latin literature and moreover to discover the most appealing translations of the hundred stories I liked most. The pages ahead contain a mixture of the familiar and the esoteric. Samuel Butler’s translation of Homer’s story of Odysseus and the Cyclops, ‘a horrid creature, not like a human being at all, but resembling rather some crag that stands out boldly against the sky on the top of a high mountain’, has an early starring role. While following the Greek closely, Butler was unafraid of omitting the odd word (for example ‘sitophagus’ – ‘corn-eating’ – before ‘human being’) to maintain the story’s pace.
In the twentieth century, E. V. Rieu revealed a similar aptitude for translating the monumentalism of Homer into natural English. ‘How strangely the Trojan and Achaean soldiers are behaving’, he wrote of the soldiers at Troy, ‘strangely’ replacing ‘wondrous deeds’ in the Greek of the Iliad. We might expect T. E. Shaw – Lawrence of Arabia – to have relished translating passages of Homeric heroism, but I was intrigued as to how he would have handled the delightfully domestic scene of Odysseus’ reunion with his wife Penelope in the Odyssey. It turns out rather well. His lively and often colloquial turn of phrase – ‘my heart is dazed’, ‘these shabby clothes’ – finds a contemporary counterpart in Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation of the poem.
Many more male translators of the classics have been published through history than female. While recent years have witnessed the release of some fantastic translations by women, several of which have found a place in this anthology, it would have been unrepresentative to have sought a 50:50 ratio in a collection that spans the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. In making my selections I chose the texts which most appealed to me on their own merit.
I haven’t always chosen the translation that is closest to the ancient text. Sometimes a looser translation can capture the spirit of a piece in a way that a strictly accurate one cannot. Ted Hughes’s telling of Ovid’s story of Pygmalion, a man who fell in love with a statue of his own creation, is masterly even where it deviates from the Latin. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid stated that Pygmalion was disgusted by women’s vices. Hughes tells us what those vices were. His Pygmalion is deeply psychological, picturing ‘every woman’s uterus’ as a ‘spider’, her perfume as a ‘floating horror’. Ovid’s Pygmalion fears bruising her lifelike flesh. Hughes’s grips her ‘to feel flesh yield under the pressure/That half wanted to bruise her/Into a proof of life, and half did not/Want to hurt or mar or least of all/Find her the solid ivory he had made her’.
I find that the best translators respect the ancient texts while making them their own. One of my favourites is based on a Latin comic novel about a wealthy former slave called Trimalchio who hosts a dinner party. The mysterious translation I have chosen was originally – but deceptively – attributed to Oscar Wilde. Though this attribution has since been retracted, the story still reads like a celebration of Victorian decadence. You can almost hear the voice of Wilde – or even Huysmans – in the description of Trimalchio, the louche protagonist of the story, being ‘carried in to the sound of music… bolstered up among a host of tiny cushions’. It is not surprising that the Roman story went on to inspire F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in the twentieth century.
Elsewhere in this collection, early modern England encroaches upon Francis Hickes’s seventeenth-century translation of a story about a dream by the ancient satirist Lucian. ‘After I had given over going to schoole’, wrote Hickes, merging his own voice with that of the Greek satirist, ‘and was grown to be a stripling of some good stature, my father advised with his friends, what it were best for him to breed mee to: and the opinion of most was, that to make mee a scholler, the labour would be long, the charge great, and would require a plentifull purse…’ When a translator accommodates a story to his own times and tongue he helps to keep it alive.
The hundred stories from classical literature included in this collection owe their survival to the lasting impression they made upon the minds of those who read them. I have tried to strike a balance between what we might call ‘classic classics’, such as John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid, and the less familiar or expected. I have included old translations, new ones, verse and prose, and a handful of my own. There are erudite but highly readable contributions from classical scholars such as Benjamin Jowett, Aubrey de Sélincourt, Martin West and the poet Robert Graves – on Caligula rather than his uncle (I) Claudius – as well as writers better known for their works of English literature. Louis MacNeice offers a fine translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Walter Pater’s translation of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ from Apuleius’ Golden Ass is to my mind unparalleled. Percy Bysshe Shelley clearly had great fun digesting Plato’s description of the primordial separation of man from woman, in which the king of the gods ‘cut human beings in half, as people cut eggs before they salt them, or as I have seen eggs cut with hairs’.
I close this anthology with a penetrating translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy by Queen Elizabeth I. I found the monarch’s apparent sympathy with the protagonist of the story incredibly moving. It brought home to me the fact that, for all the centuries that separate us, we might just as easily find ourselves in the characters of an ancient story as those of our own world.
DAISY DUNN, 2019