This paper examines the Greek novel’s engagement with a central aspect ofGreek religious experience, namely epiphany. It focuses on “epiphanic situations,”in which epiphanic language and protocols are used to describe theappearance not of a god or goddess, but of an exceptional mortal. Through anexamination of the novels’ strategies for narrating the marvelous, it shows thatthe novels’ use of the epiphanic metaphor is deeply engaged with ancient religiousexperience, as refracted through the Greek literary tradition. It advancesthree broad claims: first, that the novelists draw on, engage with, andtransform well-established Greek epiphanic conventions; second, that epiphanicsituations are so common as to be a convention of the novel that canbe remolded and reshaped by different authors to suit their individual narrativestrategies; and, third, that epiphany’s emphasis on sight and recognition is implicatedwith other concerns that have been recognized as central to the novelists’projects.Robert L. Cioffi received his Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard Universityin 2013, and he is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classicsat Bard College. His dissertation, Imaginary Lands: Ethnicity, Exoticism, andNarrative in the Ancient Novel, examines the meaning of travel in the novelsand it rethinks the relationship between identity, narrative, and exoticism inthe genre. It argues that through their descriptions of wide-ranging travel andexotic locales, the novels reflect a multiplicity of individual ways to be Greekand the many models against which an individual’s Hellenic identity can defineitself.
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