Egypt in Greco-Roman history and fiction *.(Critical Essay)

This article sketches Greek and Roman views towards the ancient Egyptians as a prelude to examining the metaphorical resonance of Egypt in the fiction of the imperial period of ancient literature. Both the Greeks and the Romans wrote about Egypt as a way of dealing with certain anxieties and issues in their own cultures. Egypt is portrayed as the terrifying "other" of Greco-Roman culture and at the same time celebrated as an ancient site of mystery and rebirth. In the ancient novels, this ambivalence is exploited in order to make statements about contemporary relationships and realities.

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In the current political and intellectual context it is not necessary to explain that the portrait created by one people, such as the Greeks or Romans, of another, such as Egypt, is likely to be a "construction" more than a "representation." In his 1971 survey of the subject, C. Froidefond characterized Greek views of Egypt as a "mirage," an imaginative vision that had as much to do with who the Greeks were as it had with who the Egyptians were. (1) Edward Said's 1978 landmark work on orientalism traced how that Egyptian mirage developed and endured over the years in response to Europe's own evolving identity, and his book made a strong case for what has become a key idea in cultural studies: Power follows knowledge, and the seemingly objective and scientific study of other cultures is often an accessory to the crimes committed by empires in the name of civilization. (2) The enormous--and often nasty--controversy that swirled around the publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena, with its accusation of racism in the conduct of European historiography, particularly in the treatment of the relationship between Europe and Egypt, has dealt a devastating blow to the pose of objectivity in the conduct of scholarship. (3) Despite this controversy, or perhaps because of it, the peculiar position of Egypt in the imaginations of the Greeks and Romans and its role in the classical world continue to be a subject of the greatest interest. I wish to contribute to this discussion by looking at the role Egypt plays in the so-called Greek romances, prose narratives of love and adventure that were composed during the Roman empire. I will begin by selectively sketching ideas about Egypt in Greek and Roman letters as a context for my remarks. (4)

Greek Views of Egypt

References to Egypt occur in practically every classical author, but it would not be correct to say that Egypt was "central" to the Greco-Roman world. Indeed, marginality is paradoxically central to classical views of Egypt. (5) The most important classical source on Egypt is Herodotus' account in a long digression from his discussion of the Persian Wars, a digression that takes up the entire second book of the Histories. Herodotus' many factual errors have long been recognized, such as his incorrect dating of the pyramid builders by a thousand years, but these are the least of his faults. A. B. Lloyd, who has written the most thorough commentary on Herodotus' Egyptian account, concludes that Herodotus "presents a view of Egypt's past which shows no genuine understanding of Egyptian history. Everything has been uncompromisingly customized for Greek consumption and cast unequivocally into a Greek mould." (6) Indeed, as Francois Hartog has argued, Egypt was one of many "barbarian" countries whose customs were often defined by the Greek historian as an inversion of Greek customs: "The Egyptians seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind." (7) However, since barbarians in Herodotus tend to be not only inversions of Greece but also set in contrasting relation to one another, shifting and inconsistent alignments sometimes emerge. For example, Hartog takes the Scythians as an example of the "mirror" of Herodotus, in which they are negative reflections of everything Greek. Nevertheless, these same Scythians become increasingly "Greek-like" when they are contrasted to the Amazons, in order to convey the otherness of the Amazons to his Greek audience. (8) Herodotus' report of various religious outrages committed by the Persian King Cambyses in his trip to Egypt, most likely fictitious, (9) produces a surprising affinity between Egypt and Greece, since both are the pious victims of impious Persians. Herodotus, in fact, displays a deep ambivalence towards Egypt, a place that is simultaneously fascinating and repulsive. To Herodotus, Egypt is a land of enormous antiquity, much older than Greek civilization, a land of ancient wisdom, the source of Greek religion, particularly the names of the gods, and most of all a land full of wonders: natural ones, such as the Nile river, and even more impressive man-made ones, such as the pyramids. However, as Phiroze Vasunia notes, Herodotus could conceive of no way these colossal monuments could have been executed without slave labor, which contributed to another key cliche about Egypt, its inclination towards despotism. From a political standpoint, Egypt could not for Herodotus be a school for democratic Greece. (10) At the same time, the great antiquity of Egypt is wedded to an emphasis on its immutability, so that Greece's progressiveness is frequently contrasted with the static character of Egyptian civilization. Just as Egypt is neither Europe nor Asia, but a place through which each passes on the way to the other, Egypt is also strangely out of the temporal stream in which the events of Europe and Asia lie. (11)

Two Greek tragedies centralize Greek-Egyptian comparisons, the Suppliant Women of Aeschylus and the Helen of Euripides. (12) The first involves the story of the descendants of Io, the Argive woman impregnated by Zeus. She traveled to Egypt in the form of a cow and there gave birth to Epaphus, whose descendants ruled Egypt and then founded numerous important cities in Greece. This kind of story, whose rationale seems to be the desire to make a claim of relative priority, will reappear in different guises, as will varying claims about the relative antiquity of Egypt and Europe. Aeschylus' play recounts the flight of the fifty daughters of Danaus (the Danaids) from their fifty first cousins, the sons of Aegyptus, and their supplication of the king of Argos for protection. The sons of Aegyptus are represented in the play by a number of negative stereotypes: their blackness is emphasized and associated with death; they are savage and lustful, and, along with the Danaids, have no appreciation of the democratic institutions of Greece, expressing surprise, for example, that the king must consult a deliberative body of Greek citizens instead of simply acting on his own advice. The Argives, on the other hand, are represented as the protectors of women against these oversexed Egyptians.

The Helen of Euripides recounts an alternative version of Helen's whereabouts during the Trojan War, namely that she spent the 10 years of the war in Egypt. Herodotus cites an account he received from the Egyptian priests at Memphis, who claimed that Helen had been kept by the good king Proteus, the type of the generous host, until the rightful husband could come for her (Histories 2.113-15). In the Odyssey, Proteus is a mythical monster whom Menelaus encounters in Egypt on his way home from Troy. He is the Old Man of the Sea, whose wisdom is accessible only to those who can hold him fast while he changes his form (Od. 4.351-570). In Euripides' version when Menelaus is shipwrecked in Egypt on his way home, he discovers that the real Helen has been there all along, while Greeks and Trojans had been fighting over a phantom double. In this telling, however, Proteus' son, Theoclymenus, is king; but he turns out to be another lustful Egyptian trying to have Helen for himself. Not the generous host, but the xenophobic murderer who customarily kills strangers who land on his shore, Theclymenus is similar to the sons of Aegyptus in Aeschylus' play, from whose rapacious grip the good Greek men must wrest their women. Such stories clearly reflect more about the anxieties of Greek men than they do about real Egyptians.