Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East онлайн

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What we have, I suggest, is a version of the very Lucianic device of metalepsis. Metalepsis is the calculated violation of the “sacred frontier” between the real world and the world of a piece of fiction. (A well-known modern example is the Martin Amis character in Martin Amis’s novel Money.) But it was already well within the competence of antiquity’s most sophisticated satirist, who has many stand-ins for himself in his other works. Where those works tend to replace his name with a perspicuous substitute such as “the Syrian,” Lycinus, or Parrhesiades (“son of the free-speaker”), this work, while it teases us with the “Assyrian” identity of its author, withholds his name altogether (ounoma hangs, without further specification, as the last word). As a guide to interpretation, the procedure is almost exactly the reverse of the True Histories, which opens with an express statement that everything that follows is lies. The travelogue itself goes on to use every gambit to encourage belief in its truth – which has been definitively undermined in advance. DDS, on the contrary, has no introductory statement, no frame, only a Herodotean ethnographic voice to which we listen with amused reservation of judgment until we get to the final sentence, with its seductions of “insiderhood.” But, after all that has come before, are we really seduced?