Fanfiction in the Fifth Century BCE
“It’s all fan fiction now,” proclaimed pop culture commentator Matt Brown on July 1, citing the recent explosion of the fanfiction phenomenon into the mainstream of film, television, and fiction itself. Just consider J.K. Rowling’s ongoing spinoffs of her Harry Potter series: the book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the upcoming West End play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and the Pottermore interactive website featuring new original writing. With fanfiction databases more popular than ever, and amateur authors now regularly landing lucrative book and even movie deals, the traditional painstaking channels to fiction publication are giving ground to the immediately-available bounty of the internet.
Among the many fascinating aspects of the fanfiction world is the central question of originality. To what extent is each “fic” the creative property of its author, and to what extent is it derivative of, and indebted (creatively, legally, and — if pertinent — financially) to the author of the “canon” that inspired it? This question has dogged fanfiction databases. The largest of these provide varying degrees of regulation or non-regulation: FanFiction.net provides a detailed copyright policy for user submissions, while ArchiveOfOurOwn.org simply states, “We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate.” But in practical terms, the threat of legal action or removal from a database holds little power to withstand the onslaught of new stories submitted to these sites every day.
In general, fanfiction characters and setting are borrowed from canon. From this base, fan authors build new plots that might fit seamlessly alongside the original, or plunge the characters into an alternate universe, as wild as the mind can imagine. Mashups of two or more works or worlds abound: Sherlock Holmes is summoned to investigate the murder of Pokemon; Eurydice from Greek myth forms a friendship with Princess Vasilisa from Russian fairy tale. And the creative process is often collaborative, as Laura Miller writes in her recent analysis of fanfiction for Vulture,
Online fic communities don’t just assert the fans’ right to make up their own stories about other people’s characters; they offer writers an unprecedented degree of input from their audience, whose comments often lead to strategic rewrites. This prospect tramples on the cherished icon of the artist as a unique genius producing singular work.
However, as Miller goes on to observe, the concept of a “unique genius” behind every work of fiction is a “a relatively recent one, instituted by the Romantic movement in the late-18th and early-19th centuries and carried forward to the present day by the mandarin creed of modernism.”
This last point rings true to me as a scholar of ancient Greek and Latin literature, and it has often struck me that many of the greatest works of ancient literature were doing something similar to modern fanfiction. What are the mythological digressions of Pindar, much of Greek tragedy, the Heroides of Ovid, even Vergil’s Aeneid if not “transformative work” (to use the technical term) based on Homer and the Epic Cycle, the ultimate “canon”? All of these examples involve creative digression from and elaboration on an original fictional source. Re-imagining ancient literature as fanfiction can, I believe, productively expand both Classicists’ discussions of intertextuality and modern readers’ notions of the historical roots and gravity of a supposedly new phenomenon.
In his Poetics, Aristotle acknowledges the proliferation of tragedies based on Epic Cycle material in the course of praising the Iliad’s tightly unified plot (Poetics 1459a-b, trans. Fyfe 1932):
Homer may seem, as we have already said, divinely inspired, in that even with the Trojan war, which has a beginning and an end, he did not endeavor to dramatize it as a whole. … He takes one part of the story only and uses many incidents from other parts. … The other [poets], on the contrary, all write about a single hero or about a single period or about a single action with a great many parts, the authors, for example, of the Cypria and the Little Iliad. The result is that out of an Iliad or an Odyssey only one tragedy can be made, or two at most, whereas several have been made out of the Cypria, and out of the Little Iliad more than eight…
Aristotle does not only see Homer’s approach to plot as superior to that of the more sprawling Cycle poems; he also seems to view the Homeric epics’ resistance to “fanfiction” treatment in tragedy as a mark of their superiority. Like the arbiters of literary taste in our own time, Aristotle erects parameters for what qualifies as excellence in literature, and that includes originality, refinement, and the elevation of an individual, “divinely inspired” authorial genius.
Putting aside judgments of literary quality, there is an analogy between Aristotle’s observation and trends in modern fanfiction, wherein by far the most popular “fandoms” are those of large-scale novel series that create their own universe and are full of details and digressions that can be expanded upon by enthusiastic readers. The top five fandoms on Fanfiction.net, for example, are Harry Potter (genitor of 556,000 fics), Twilight (136,000), Percy Jackson and the Olympians (56,100), Lord of the Rings (47,400), and Hunger Games (35,700). The more limited in scope and plot the canon work, the fewer fanfictions it tends to spawn.
An equivalence between modern fanfiction and ancient literary treatments of myth and epic cannot be made without qualification, of course. Even within the fanfiction community, among both fan authors and scholars, there is lively debate over how to define and limit the term. Catherine Tosenberger has argued that fanfiction is by nature “unpublishable,” and Kristina Busse argues for limiting the definition to works “culturally situated within a fan community.” A less restrictive definition (such as that provided by Wikipedia) simply describes fanfiction as “fiction about characters or settings from an original work of fiction, created by fans of that work rather than by its creator.”
If fanfiction is indeed “unpublishable,” then any surviving works of ancient literature fail the test — but then, so do any number of contemporary works of fanfiction that have made the leap to publication (e.g. Wicked, Wide Sargasso Sea, and of course Fifty Shades of Grey). The “fan-created” component is murkier territory when it comes to evaluating ancient works that are clear transformations of the Homeric/Epic Cycle canon. Were Euripides and Vergil “fans” of Homer? Is admiration in the form of intertextual engagement evidence of fanship? If not, how else might fanship be assessed when dealing with the sparse testimony of surviving ancient literature?
Fans today demonstrate fanship by reading, thinking about, writing in response to/in derivation of, and discussing their favorite authors’ works; certainly the first three of these activities can be said of many ancient authors about Homer. Mutatis mutandis, then, and with the possible objections to this equivalence duly noted, I would like to explore one specific slice of ancient literature as a kind of fanfiction.
While Greek tragedy and Vergil have well-documented relationships with their source material, a lesser-known manifestation of ancient fanfiction is that produced by the first sophistic movement. In the space of a generation or so at the end of the fifth century BCE and beginning of the fourth, several sophists appropriated Homeric/Epic Cycle characters to serve as exemplars of rhetorical argumentation, thus putting Greek culture’s most popular fiction series to use for their didactic and promotional purposes. Gorgias’ Defense of Palamedes, Alcidamas’ Odysseus, and Antisthenes’ paired speeches Ajax and Odysseus are surviving sophistic model speeches in which mythical figures argue legal cases suggested by episodes from the epic tradition.
Constructing imaginary cases or arguments as practice for real court cases was a common method of sophistic instruction in fifth-century Athens (see Usher (1999) p. 2). What is unique about these four speeches is that they provide a link between literary works and cultural phenomena that are generally thought of as separate: Archaic poetry and formal rhetorical prose. By exploiting the appeal of well-known characters from epic, the sophists found an effective way to disseminate and popularize their own product.
The analogy to modern fanfiction is not perfect: the sophists had a clear didactic and profit motive for their creative expansion of the epic tradition, whereas today’s fanfiction amateurs primarily write for the gratification of fellow fans without an aim to profit (although didactic modern fanfiction is not unheard of, as I will demonstrate). But Gorgias, Alcidamas, and Antisthenes did produce “transformative works” by placing these canonical tales and characters into a new context — making epic heroes into sophists of varying skill levels, with the resulting new versions of their personae and new ways of relating to each other. The familiar Odysseus of Homeric epic, for example, appears in these speeches in a variety of guises, from sympathetic patriot to viciously unscrupulous prosecutor.
Gorgias’ Defense of Palamedes and Alcidamas’ Odysseus: Against the Treachery of Palamedes, though separated by a generation or more in time (Gorgias’ speech was written around the turn of the fifth/fourth century BCE; Alcidamas’ in the early- to mid-fourth century), work as a dialectic pair. Since Alcidamas was one of Gorgias’ pupils, it is likely that he composed the Odysseus as a rejoinder to Gorgias’ Palamedes.
The canon from which these two speeches derive is the lost Cycle poem Cypria, which tells of how Odysseus accused his fellow Greek warrior Palamedes of handing over strategy secrets to the enemy in the middle of the Trojan war — a false accusation, according to later tradition on the subject including Aeneid Book 2, Apollodorus’ Epitome, and Hyginus’ Fabulae). Odysseus was motivated by a desire for revenge on the man who had seen through his attempt to dodge the Trojan War by feigning madness. After a trial, Palamedes was found guilty by his Greek comrades and executed.
But how had Odysseus managed to get Palamedes convicted on trumped-up charges? This is where Gorgias and Alcidamas are in their element: the epic episode becomes a departure point for their own rhetorical portraits of the two players in this deadly feud. Gorgias’ Palamedes is logical, measured; he unleashes a barrage of arguments based on the rhetorical device of eikos, or likelihood. “I could not if I wished, nor would I if I could, put my hand to such works as these [i.e., treason]” (Defense of Palamedes 5, trans. Dillon and Gergel 2003), he reasons, citing such practicalities as the language barrier between himself and his supposed Trojan conspirators. He also argues from the virtue of his own character — the rhetorical device of ethos — and his past benefactions to the Greeks (15):
Now someone might say that I have entered on this through a passion for wealth and money. But I possess a modest sufficiency of money, and I have no need of much…To the truth of this claim I offer my past life as witness, and to this you yourselves can be witnesses. You have been my companions, so you know where the truth lies.
And (30–31):
I am not only blameless but actually a major benefactor of you and of the Greek nation and of mankind in general, not only of the present generation but of all those to come. For who else but I made human life viable instead of destitute, and civilized instead of uncivilized, by developing military tactics… written laws… writing… weights and measures… numbers… powerful beacons and very swift messenger services — and, last but not least, draughts, a harmless way of passing the time?
Readers’ knowledge of the canon outside of this speech — the fact that Palamedes has been unjustly accused and will be executed — adds pathos to his appeals. And Palamedes’ use of specific rhetorical techniques transforms the epic hero into a fifth-century sophist (not entirely unlike current fanfiction-inflected television shows that imagine Sherlock Holmes practicing his craft in 21st century London or New York).
In the corresponding prosecution speech, Alcidamas’ Odysseus focuses on character assassination. While Palamedes had cited his own reputation as a clever thinker and inventor as a point in his favor, Odysseus argues that these qualities make him worthy of suspicion. “The man I am going to accuse is both educated and clever (philosophos te kai deinos),” he warns, “so it is right that you must give me your attention and not be careless over what is now being said” (Odysseus 4, trans. Muir 2001). Odysseus places himself in the role of benevolent protector of the audience (his own exercise of the ethos device), in contrast to Palamedes who will take advantage of them with his threatening intelligence. The irony, as Nancy Worman has discussed (pp. 182–85), is that this is the pot calling the kettle black; Odysseus is the ultimate philosophos te kai deinos in Homeric tradition.
In addition to his hypocrisy in discrediting Palamedes for his cleverness and skilled speech, Odysseus attacks Palamedes’ origins and family, labeling his father a poor man of unsavory character who “left no kind of crime untouched” (12–13); and the evidence he presents for his treason accusation is circumstantial and dubious. His ingratiating rhetoric wins the day. But this is clearly not the upstanding Odysseus of the Homeric epics.
If Alcidamas depicts Odysseus as a shrewd and unscrupulous prosecutor of Palamedes, Antisthenes gives us an Odysseus who is both the embodiment of evil (according to Ajax) and the pinnacle of virtue (according to Odysseus himself) in his paired model speeches. The basis for Antisthenes’ creation is the hoplon krisis episode depicted in the Little Iliad and alluded to in Odyssey 11, in which Ajax and Odysseus argue before their fellow Greek warriors for the rights to the slain Achilles’ armor. Like the most famous retelling of this story — Sophocles’ Ajax, produced a generation earlier — Antisthenes’ speeches represent a transformation of the epic version into a new genre. The structure of the speeches as a symmetrical pair (antilogy) allows Antisthenes to illustrate competing rhetorical strategies and philosophical ideologies.
In Antisthenes’ verbal characterization of Odysseus and Ajax, the traditional polarities between their characters spun out to extremes. Ajax is the man of action, forthright and naïve, who champions deeds over words and antagonizes the jury he needs to convince. By contrast, Antisthenes’ Odysseus is the consummate sophist, attuned to his audience and exuding calm but firm moral superiority. Throughout Odysseus’ speech there are allusions to sophistic terminology of Antisthenes’ age, such as the mention of “likelihood” (eikos) as a basis on which the jury might form an opinion (54.5). Such play with the boundaries between the heroic setting of Odysseus’ speech and its programmatic function culminates in the closing lines. While employing a string of Homeric and quasi-Homeric epithets, Odysseus provides the “inception” for the canon on which this speech is based (14):
I suppose if ever there should be born some poet who is wise (tis sophos poietes) concerning heroic virtue, he would depict me as endurance-full (polutlanta) and plan-full (polumetin) and resourceful (polumechanon) and city-sacking (ptoliporthon).
Antisthenes’ choice of sophos as a modifier for the (Homeric) “poet” here at the end of the speech slyly marks the confluence of Homeric tradition and his own sophistic fanfiction.
In their dual function as entertainment and instruction, these sophistic speeches have company in modern fanfiction. A prominent example of fanfiction with didactic aspirations is the popular book-length work Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. This fic depicts Harry as a special young wizard attending Hogwarts school of wizardry with largely the same cast of characters as in J.K. Rowling’s original, but with the key variant that he has been trained in rational thinking by his adoptive father. At Hogwarts, Harry uses this training to analyze the magic of the wizarding world through scientific experimentation.
The author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Eliezer Yudkowsky, studies human rationality and artificial intelligence as a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. From the author notes on his fic, it is clear that Yudkowsky intends the story as an educational illustration of rationality for its readers:
What…Harry thinks is often meant as a good pattern to follow, especially if Harry thinks about how he can cite scientific studies to back up a particular principle…If you haven’t just enjoyed this fic, but learned something from it, then please consider blogging it or tweeting it. A work like this only does as much good as there are people who read it.
As with the sophists, Yudkowsky’s own profession informs his fanfiction endeavors.
The parameters of fanfiction will continue to be contested as the phenomenon grows ever more popular and as more fics cross into the mainstream of popular culture. But perhaps the truth is that fanfiction is even bigger than many imagine. As long as humans have been telling stories to each other, they have been telling stories about those stories, spinning new scenarios from familiar characters, serving their own interests even as they as they delight their readership, and blurring the lines between fiction consumer and producer in an ever-expanding process. “It’s all fan fiction now,” indeed — and it always has been.
Rachel Ahern Knudsen has taught Classics at the University of Oklahoma and Santa Clara University. Her book Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric and several articles reflect her interest in the relationship between poetry, myth, and rhetoric.
Portions of this article have been adapted from “Poetic Speakers, Sophistic Words” (Knudsen AJP 2012).
