XENOPHON OF EPHESUS ON ISIS AND ALEXANDRIA
J. GWYN GRIFFITHS (Swansea)
In some ways there is a marked contrast between the work of Xenophon of Ephesus and that of Apuleius, and the latter has received, partly for this very reason, a good deal more attention.1 Xenophon's religious outlook and the question of his origin are mat ters which will, I feel sure, be of interest to Professor Maarten J. Vermaseren, the distinguished scholar whom we are now delighted to honour. I
Xenophon of Ephesus is regarded usually as an inferior author. Certainly some of his modern expositors, notably Merkelbach, show much more subtlety than one feels Xenophon himself was capable of. One is reminded a little of the intricate diagrams which Claude Levi-Strauss is sometimes able to impose on primitive myths. A comparison with Apuleius also shows Xenophon in a rather modest and unambitious light. Apuleius is a skilled craftsman who in the Metamorphoses has brilliantly shaped the material borrowed by him, adding some significant material of his own and withal an impressive dimension of depth. By comparison Xenophon is naive and simplistic. Yet sometimes he shows a telling force of phrase and some of his episodes are related with a degree of descriptive power. At times we feel that there is something lacking in the central psychological motivation of his novel; in particular, the move ment of the characters from one place to another seems often to be aimless, although the travel-element in other ancient novels is open to a similar doubt. Yet his very weaknesses make him in some ways a more important witness to the origin and character of the early Greek novel. If Chariton doubtless wrote before Xenophon of
1 Cf. the Bibliography in my Apuleius of Madauros: The Isis-Book (Metamorphoses XI). Edited with an Introduction, Translation, and Com mentary (= EPRO 29; Leiden, 1975). 410 J. GWYN GRIFFITHS
Ephesus, yet it is the latter, as Reardon 2 points out, who repre sents the difficulties which the early form of the novel imposed on a less resourceful writer. Whereas the Ephesian Tale is by no means the earliest of the Greek novels, there is a tendency now to place him in the early second century A.D.3 Georges Dalmeyda 4 is uncertain, but in clines to a date not later than A.D. 263. In that year the famous temple of Artemis was destroyed, and although it was reconstructed in part afterwards, there can be no doubt that the vivid description which Xenophon gives of the cult of Artemis in Ephesus belongs to the period of its heydey, that is, before 263.0 It is true that some details seem to be borrowed from Herodotus. That the Ephesian Tale has a consciously strong religious ele ment is manifest from the start, and in assessing this the pantheistic
2 Cf. B. R. Reardon, Courants litteraires grecs des lIe et Ille siecles apres f.-G. (Paris, 1971), p. 358. Franz Zimmermann, Die 'E