Paradoxography, or “writing about marvels,” can be traced back to at least the third century B.C., when the Greek poet and scholar Callimachus assembled A Collection of Wonders from the Entire Earth Arranged by Locality, a compilation of supposedly true facts about the wondrous properties of certain natural phenomena such as waters, animals, plants, stones, and places. Callimachus’ work reflected two trends in the Greek cultural world of his day—an increasing fascination with wondrous phenomena and a literary interest in making compilations (laws, local traditions, fables, jokes, and so on). Although some twenty Greek and Roman paradoxographers are known to have produced works in the centuries that followed, the genre remains little known. Even if you are a classical scholar, you are unlikely to have heard of paradoxography, since histories of Greek and Roman literature mostly ignore subliterary genres.
Ancient paradoxographical works, like their modern counterparts, display a range in tone from the mild (for example, the strange properties of magnetic stones) to the sensational (for example, the birth of a multi-headed infant), corresponding more or less to our Ripley’s Believe it or Not! at the one end and our supermarket tabloids at the other. The ancient collections that survive are of the quiet sort, with the single exception of the little compilation of amazing and sometimes bizarre wonders, On Marvels, made by Phlegon of Tralles, a Greek author of the second century A.D. His equally strange composition, On Long-Lived Persons, has also come down to us.
On Marvels is a collection of wonders of an extreme sort, most of them pertaining to humans. Thus, chapters 1-3 deal with dead persons who return to quasi-life as revenants; chapters 4-10, mostly with females who turn unexpectedly into males; chapters 11-19, with discoveries of giant bones; chapters 20-31, with instances of unusual childbirth; chapters 32-33, with persons who aged with abnormal rapidity; and chapters 34-35, with the capture of live centaurs. The individual chapters vary greatly in length, some of them having been copied word-for-word from earlier documents, others briefly summarized by the compiler. There are some gems here. Chapter 1, the story of Philinnion, is the most intriguing ghost story to come down to us from antiquity. Chapter 10 appears to preserve the text of a genuine Sibylline oracle.
On Long-Lived Persons likewise focuses upon the marvelous, in this case upon marvelous longevity, reflecting ancient curiosity about the human life-span. This little work consists mostly of lists of names, grouped by age, beginning with Italians who have lived to the age of one hundred, then persons who are 101-110 years old, and so on. Most of the names derive from the Roman census records (Phlegon, a freedman of the emperor Hadrian, lived in Rome). But not all. At the end of the work comes a legendary seeress who lived almost a thousand years, along with some of her oracular utterances.
The present book is an excellent new critical edition of these unusual works, edited by the Italian scholar Antonio Stramaglia. It is addressed to persons who read Greek and Latin, Phlegon’s text being in Greek, and the editor’s preface and commentaries being in Latin.[1] For scholars of folk narrative or folk belief who read the classical languages, Stramaglia’s edition will surely be fascinating territory to explore. Readers will be grateful, moreover, that the editor has made every effort to lighten their load, first, by providing a full and informative preface and, second, by equipping his edition with two welcome tools, namely, an usually helpful critical apparatus that deals with problems in the Greek text, and an “auxiliary” apparatus (as he calls it) that compares passages in Phlegon with passages in other ancient authors and that offers aid in the form of brief comments or scholarly bibliography on difficult passages.
[1] For interested non-readers of the ancient languages, translations into modern languages are available. The present reviewer published an English translation of and commentary upon these two works by Phlegon, in addition to fragments of a third work, Olympiads: William Hansen, Phlegon of Tralles’ Book of Marvels (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996). There are also renderings with or without commentary in Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, and Dutch. A complete list is given by Stramaglia (xxxviii-xxxix).
--------
[Review length: 704 words • Review posted on September 21, 2011]