El motivo del viaje en Las historias increíbles de más allá de Tule de Antonio Diógenes

Abstract

The very peculiar case of the story by Antonius Diogenes is herein analyzed as a complement to an extensive study on the subject of travel in the ancient Greek novel. This is done with particular emphasis on some of the aspects and stages of the travel narrated. This text presents several unique features, mainly due to the contamination from other genres such as that of utopian travel narrative and from ethnographical, paradoxographical and philosophical literature. Because of, even though it involves certain concessions to the typical relationship in Greek novels between the topic of travelling and the adventures, the travel becomes in Antonius Diogenes’ story a pretext for the unfolding of the other matters. Therefore, this story opened a road full of novelties in the genre, proving at the same time and paradoxically to be one of its cornerstones in this deviation from the standard of the known Greek novel, and also manifests the didactic concerns of its author, that reach unusual proportions in the ancient novel.