The Milan research unit will focus on Greek Imperial prose, with a special emphasis on the Greek novel. The scholarly basis will be the long-established recognition that Imperial prose, with great originality, appropriated the literary genres of the age of the polis.
This phenomenon was wide and complex, and developed in different eras and places. The first step is to have a clear agenda, and to this effect we will take our cue from the following assumptions.
First, Greek literary genres began to be imitated and transformed as early as in the late Classical Era, as Plato and Isocrates most clearly prove. In different ways, both authors appropriated traditional genres to create an artistic prose designed to resonate with the whole range of Greek lterature. Thus, to a certain extent, their approach was already looking beyond the age of the polis.
Second, theatre proved a major influence on ancient prose writers (along with Homer, who was traditionally considered a “tragic” poet). The reason for this lay in the fact that both tragedy and comedy were perceived as symbols of Greek identity: not only were they reminiscent of archaic literary genres, but they soon became the distinctive “voice” of Athens and, shortly afterwards, of Greek society as a whole.
The notion of identity, then, is going to play a pivotal role for the Milan unit. The new role played by the Greeks during this age forced educated men to create new ways to express themselves. This led to the transformation of literature from the “voice of the polis” into the “voice of a province”, however self-conscious and confident in its culturally leading role. The Greek novel played a key role in this process of revision and re-assertion. This new genre, which encompassed and superseded the whole range of Classical models, provided the Greeks of the Imperial Age with new forms of self-knowledge and inquiry.
As such, the Greek novel can be fruitfully compared to Classical drama in two different ways. On the one hand, it is well known that themes and motifs from both Classical and Hellenistic theatre, greatly influenced, with the help of new dramatic forms such as mime and pantomime, the ancient romances, and many sources go so far as to suggest that the ancient word for “novel” was drama. On the other hand, the Greek novel seems to have inherited the innermost nature of ancient theatre, namely its ability to convey meaning through exemplary events.
Many scholars of the research unit have already given important contributions to the study of this new genre, and they are strongly committed to break new ground. Among the main research topics, it is worth mentioning the following:
- the coexistence of local and global identities: the novel as the privileged voice of the Greek “glocalisation” under the Romans;
- the “aesthetics” of the novel: the development of enargeia and phantasia to enhance ekphrastic narratives, with an emphasis on ancient models, Imperial schools (progymnasmata and rhetoric) and popular forms of spectacle;
- the Greek novel in Imperial prose as a whole: the mutual relationship between ancient fiction and the other prose genres in the Imperial Age;
- the reception and transformation of the Greek novel in the Byzantine Era, when theatre inspired the creation of overtly dramatic forms, such as the choice of writing novels in verse
- the literary texture of Greek epidictic oratory in the Imperial Age.