Heliodorus’ Aethiopica in Antony of Tagrit’s Fifth Book of Rhetoric: A Follow-up Study, Sixteen Years after the Discovery

Due to the absence of Syriac translations of ancient Greek novels or explicit references to any of them in the Syriac literature, scholars agreed for a long time that these texts never reached Syriac environments. However, in 2008, Aldo Corcella recognized two excerpts from Heliodorus’ Aethiopica (III, 10.2 and 10.5) in the fifth book of the treatise on Rhetoric written by the ninth-century West Syrian teacher Antony of Tagrit (subject 2, “On figures”, ed. Watt 1986), composed as a handbook for students. Antony is the earliest known witness of the Syriac rhetorical tradition, based on Greco-Roman models as well as properly Syriac ones and drawn from both non-Christian and Christian texts (Nicosia, forthcoming 2023). The same Heliodorean excerpts appear in another Syriac text, the thirteenth-century treatise The Book of Dialogues, composed by the West Syrian bishop Severus bar Šakko, in the section called Dialogue on Poetry (question 17). This dialogue is based on Antony of Tagrit’s Book Five of the Rhetoric.The paper aims to follow up on Corcella’s discovery by analyzing the evidence coming from available manuscripts, especially Deir al-Surian ms. Syr. 32, which overturns some of the previously established assumptions. It also analyzes the translation technique employed by the translator of the Heliodorean excepts and compares the evidence offered by Antony of Tagrit’s and Bar Šakko’s texts to suggest a possible path of transmission for the novelistic material in the Syriac world. In so doing, it discusses the role played by Greek novelistic material in the Syriac school teaching, trying to provide a tentative answer to how two excerpts from a Greek novel ended up in a Syriac rhetorical treatise.