Greek Migrant Literature in the Early Roman Empire

This article argues that the concept of migrant literature, developed in postcolonial studies, is a useful tool for analysing Greek literature of the Early Roman Empire (27 BC-AD 68). The city of Rome attracted huge numbers of migrants from across the Mediterranean. Among them were many writers from Hellenized provinces like Egypt, Syria and Asia, who wrote in Greek. Leaving their native regions and travelling to Rome, they moved between cultures, responding in Greek to the new world order. Early imperial Greek writers include Strabo of Amasia, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Nicolaus of Damascus, Timagenes of Alexandria, Crinagoras of Mytilene, Philo of Alexandria and Paul of Tarsus. What connects these authors of very different origins, styles, beliefs, and literary genres is migrancy. They are migrant writers whose works are characterized by in-betweenness, ambivalence and polyphony.

Sources for political conversations in Late Republican Rome

Chapter 2 considers Cicero’s letters, which are the main source of this book. These letters are exceptional since they were largely written shortly after conversations took place and, although they underwent several processes of selection throughout their transmission, they were not rewritten and are deprived of hindsight bias. Thus, they provide us with an insider’s perspective on conversations and politics, transmitting the political uncertainty of the period. This contrasts with how later historians, from Nicolaus of Damascus onwards, depicted political conversations during the Roman Republic, paying attention to other elements and markers, such as non-verbal gestures, instead of focusing (as Cicero did) on the impressions from conversations, feelings, and speculations about the future.

Herod in History

Most of our information about Herod the Great derives from the accounts found in Josephus’ Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. Together they constitute quite a unique resource on one of the most famous personalities of ancient history. But whence did Josephus get his information? It is commonly agreed that his primary source was Nicolaus of Damascus, Herod’s court historian, though the extent to which Josephus adapted his material remains disputed. This book takes a modern source-critical approach to Josephus’ extensive account of Herod’s reign to suggest that Josephus did indeed rely heavily on Nicolaus’s work, but that previous scholarship was mistaken in seeing Nicolaus as a mere propagandist. Nicolaus may have begun his Universal History while Herod was alive, but he finished it after his death. He thus had no reason to write propaganda. This makes his work all the more interesting, for what we have instead is something rather different: a Syrian intellectual claiming a place in Augustan Rome, by telling a story about what the Augustan World looks like on the Eastern periphery. We delineate Nicolaus’ approach to various critical topics in Herod’s reign in order to reveal the Damascene’s perception of client kingship, the impact of empire, and the difficulties involved in ruling Judaea. Most significantly of all, we uncover an Eastern intellectual’s view on how to succeed and how to fail in the new Augustan world order.

Herod and his Historians

In this introductory chapter, we lay out the scope and aims of our book. Who was Herod, and who wrote about him? In particular, who was Nicolaus of Damascus? And why would we want to try to recover his account of the king? We note that Herod’s modern biographers regularly make assumptions about Nicolaus that are based on a questionable premise, and opt for a new approach. We set our treatment within the history of scholarship and justify our methodological approach to Josephus’ text in the hope of recovering Nicolaus’ own views on the Eastern monarch and much more besides.

Nepos’ Life of Atticus, Nicolaus’ Life of Caesar, and the Genre of Political Biography in the Age of Augustus

This chapter assesses the genre of political biography in the age of Augustus, comparing Cornelius Nepos’ Life of Atticus to the next political biography extant in the tradition, the Life of Caesar (Augustus) by Nicolaus of Damascus. These biographies are not often compared, despite their chronological proximity, and the comparison yields significant points of thematic overlap as well as meaningful points of contrast. Ultimately, one cannot define political biography in the Augustan period very specifically, nor can one measure Nepos’ originality very decisively. That is not to say that the generic distinction between political biography and political history in the age of Augustus did not exist or could not be felt, for Nepos’ Atticus shows well enough how the craft of biography is distinct from the craft of history. However, it is to admit that one cannot delineate how that craft was transmitted from Nepos and Nicolaus to Suetonius and Plutarch, from the earliest to the greatest extant writers of ancient political biography.

The Romance of Zarinaea and Stryangaeus

Another ‘romance’ that was clearly influential on later Greek novels was the story of Zarinaea and Stryangaeus, first recounted (in Greek) in Ctesias’s Persica (early fourth century BCE). A fragment of a heavily novelistic version by Nicolaus of Damascus survives from the time of Augustus. This shows that erotic romance existed, and pre-existed, in forms different from the Hellenocentric mode adopted by Chariton and his immediate successors.

Roman Assimilation of Greek Myths and Botany

“Roman Assimilation of Greek Myths and Botany” traces the absorption of Greek botanical thought by the Romans. Although Roman thinkers—Cato the Elder, Varro, Virgil and Columella—wrote about agriculture, theoretical botany was largely abandoned, while the one—sex model of plants remained entrenched. Roman myths, many syncretized with Greek, reinforced the gender bias by which plants were associated with women. Chloris, Greek goddess of flowers, was assimilated to Flora, and Ceres to Demeter. Ovid recounts a story concerning Flora and Juno that symbolically connects flowers to parthenogenesis. Of Greek derived works on plants, only Pliny’s Historia Natura and Nicolaus of Damascus’ De Plantis were widely available in the Middle Ages. One interpretation of flowers by Pliny the Elder, that they were created to delight human beings, endured into of the Christian era, while St. Augustine sited the “degeneration” of plants grown from seed as “palpable evidence” for original sin.