Alexandria and Absence

Alexandria and Absence

Robert Cioffi (Bard College)

Heliodorus’ Aethiopica opens with a famously enigmatic tableau of the Heracleotic mouth of the Nile, just twenty miles from the future site of Alexandria. Instead of a bustling urban center familiar to the novel’s contemporary readers, we encounter a wasteland: a beach strewn with bodies and, in the midst of it all, the novel’s protagonists, Theagenes and Charicleia. This passage has been read as enigmatic ekphrasis (e.g., Bartsch 1989, Whitmarsh 2002), as a reference to the Odyssey (e.g., Telò 2011, Tagliabue 2015), and through the lens of Greek tragedy (Winkler 1980). This paper takes Heliodorus as a case study to consider the interrelationship of time and environment, genre and religious and cultural traditions in a Greek novel that stands at the cusp of Late Antiquity. The scene is so stunning—and so bewildering—that the internal audience of “Egyptian bandits” identify Charicleia as either “Artemis or the local goddess Isis” (1.2.6). This moment of bodily syllepsis between Greek and Egyptian frames of reference, I suggest, invites us to read Heliodorus’ “(re)wilding” and depopulation of the space through another Egyptian tradition: apocalypse. In particular, I argue for multiple linguistic and thematic resonances between the Aethiopica and an Egyptian text known as the Oracle of the Potter, which predicts the destruction of Alexandria and the restoration of native Egyptian kingship. The absence of Alexandria signifies not a restoration of the pharaohs, however, but rather reveals another period during which Egypt was ruled by outsiders (the Persians). My reading prompts a broader set of questions about Heliodorus’ relationship to Hellenism as well as to Egypt itself: “pure” Egyptian kingship remains impossible.

Bartsch, S. (1989) Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, Princeton, NJ.

Tagliabue, A. (2015) “Heliodorus’s Aethiopica and the Odyssean Mnesterophonia: An Intermedial Reading,” TAPA 145: 445-68.

Telò, M. (2011) “The Eagle’s Gaze in the Opening of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica,” AJPh 132: 581–613.

Whitmarsh, T. (2002) “Written on the Body: Ekphrasis, Perception, and Deception in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica,” Ramus 31: 111–25.

Winkler, J.J. (1980) “Lollianos and the Desperados,” JHS 100: 155–81.