ABSTRACT
Ctesias of Cnidus, a writer of Persica and Indica, is a problematic author:1 he seems to have been known as unreliable in antiquity, the fragments show that he is often wrong-sometimes apparently by choice so as to contradict Herodotus-and for the modern reader much of the material in the fragments is not very historical.2 For all these reasons, he has not met with positive appreciation from modern scholars,3 and it has even been doubted whether Ctesias is to be considered a historian at all.4 Certain recent studies have attempted to present a more positive image of Ctesias by arguing that he never aimed to write pure history. Thus, Llewellyn-Jones (2010, 70-71) contends that ‘at no point was Ctesias under the illusion that he was writing straight history’. For Stronk (2007, 45), Ctesias can be considered ‘partly as a, perhaps rather poor, historian, primarily however as a “poet” in the sense of “writer of historical fiction” or “creative writer”’. He claims that ‘Ctesias “reworks” historical facts and thus transforms various occurrences into his version of the truth. In his work history has merely become a part of the plot. What happened or what was said to have happened or even what could have happened and never happened at all is indistinguishably mixed. In Ctesias’ hands historiography becomes the creative narration on the basis of an-in itself potentially reliable-historical nucleus: one might call it “faction” or a kind of historical novel’ (Stronk 2007, 44). ‘Essentially, . . . his work has become “fiction in prose”’ (Stronk 2011, 392). A similar interpretation has been put forward by Madreiter (2012, 122-5), who deems historiographic metafiction the most appropriate label and concludes that, ‘to understand the Persica . . . (at least partially) as historical metafiction, is to restore to the work the value it loses when seen as historiography in the strict sense of the word’ (124).5 Others have concluded that the genre of Ctesias’ works cannot be established.6
