The Poet’s Voice is an intervention in the field of classics and is committed to the slow, close reading of Greek texts. The testing of how critical activity could be transformed by theoretical reflection is to be found in how the texts of antiquity were opened to a transformative exploration of their meaning. The practice of the discipline – how texts are read and understood, what questions are authorized, what sorts of answers countenanced – is what is at stake in such an enterprise. The Poet’s Voice is written from within the discipline of classics, to transform it from within, and hence its focus is on critically reading the texts of the discipline, both the ancient literature and its modern critics. That is how its theoretical commitment is embodied and enacted.

While some Classicists have made cases for the birth of fiction, linking it to various authors and texts, others have argued that fictionality is a core concern of Greek literature from its beginnings to the Imperial era. In chapter 2, I agree with the idea that fictionality did not have to be discovered at some point but then proceed to argue that neither did it ever play an important role. After presenting evidence for the familiarity of fictionality in antiquity, I reconsider two authors who often appear as cornerstones in histories of fictionality, Gorgias and Aristotle. A closer look at their reflections draws our attention to two dimensions of ancient narrative that were deemed far more important than its referentiality, namely its immersive quality and its moral thrust.

After acknowledging the important contribution of structuralist narratology to the study of ancient literature in the past decades, the first chapter highlights its price: forged mostly in the reading of modern novels, narratological taxonomies have occluded peculiarities of ancient narrative and its understanding of narrative. I discuss various alternative approaches to ancient narrative and then introduce the one chosen in this book: I take key concepts of modern narrative theory and explore how ancient texts relate to it. Instead of striving to prove the existence or prefiguration of these concepts in antiquity and thereby to prove ancient literature as modern avant la lettre, I will zero in on the fault lines, where the ancient sense of narrative does not map onto our categories.

The idea of a narrator that is distinct from the author is a basic tenet of narratology. In ancient criticism, however, this idea absent. What is more, ancient critics tended to ascribe utterances of characters in general to authors. This, I argue, is not a deficiency but the expression of a distinctly ancient view of voice, which I reconstruct on the basis of a wide array of texts. Where we see several narrative levels nested into each other, ancient authors and readers envisaged narration as an act of impersonation. One upshot of my analysis is that, while it may be intriguing to explore metalepseis in ancient literature, the very idea of metalepsis conflicts with the premises of narrative as it was understood in antiquity. The ancient view of narration can be linked at least partly to the prominence of performance and therefore reveals the impact of socio-cultural factors; at the same time, it resonates with recent cognitive theory, notably embodied and enactive models of cognition.

Chapter 5 touches on some of the points brought up in Chapter 3, notably ancient views of character, but has a different focus – narrative motivation, a category prominent particularly in story-oriented narratology. The Odyssey is the origin of the classical Western plot, and yet the motivation of the Penelope scenes in books 18 and 19 does not follow the logic which modern realist novels have made our default model. Instead, I suggest, Odyssey 18 and 19 have a design premised on features that we encounter in medieval narratives, notably retroactive motivation, thematic isolation and suspense about how. The reason why Penelope has provoked innumerous psychologizing interpretations in modern scholarship is that her comportment is not psychologically motivated by Homer. Similar cases of motivation that are bound to strike the reader of modern novels as peculiar can be found in Homer and also later literature. At first sight, these cases may seem to conflict with the emphasis on motivation in Aristotle and the scholia, but in viewing motivation in terms of plot rather than psychology, the critics share common ground with the texts discussed.

To round up and sharpen the critical dialogue of ancient Greek texts with modern narrative theory, the final chapter compares the ancient sense of narrative as explored in the course of this study with what we find in postmodern literature. At first sight, the similarities are striking: postmodern narratives challenge the distinction between fact and fiction, ignore the boundaries between narrative levels, play with character presentation and forgo motivation in psychological terms. However, whereas postmodern authors consciously undercut the conventions of modern realist novels, ancient authors follow their own, independent logic. The parallels between pre- and postmodern narratives belong to utterly different frameworks, which endow them with different significances. Cast as a challenge, postmodern texts remain fixated on modernism. Ancient texts, on the other hand, while having influenced the rise of the modern novel, are premised on their own distinct view of narrative.