What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

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austendw
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

Post by austendw »

neilgodfrey wrote:You have given the answer to the problem you raise. That's the "beauty" of the historical style -- the sources are stated and assessed for their reliability or otherwise.
I'm not actually sure that Plutarch does assess the "reliability or otherwise" of the narratives he transmits. In the Life of Theseus he actually pleads indulgence from his reader: he implies that it may all be legend, but that's what you have to accept when you are dealing with stories from ancient times. But he certainly won't let the fact that some or all of the story is probably made up prevent him from telling the story anyway... as if it really happened. (I suspect that the way some ancient cultures took this "indulgent" view of their own ancient history is significant, and explains how the further back into the past one went the more legendary and fanciful the narratives became... without anyone signalling the changes in any significant way.)
neilgodfrey wrote:That's exactly what a reader of history appreciates.
Well, the precise definition of this may be a semantic one, and I can see our difference of opinion going down an blind alley, so I'm not going to pursue the point. However what does bother me is the context in which this definition is made: the binary opposition of "history" and "fiction". You imply that these are the only two options. I don't have much of an argument with saying that if a writer employs this rhetoric both the writer intends for his readers to know he's doing history. But does that mean that if he does not employ that rhetoric it follows that the writer and his readers know he must be writing fiction?

More importantly still, do you believe that this distinction is a transhistorical function of all literature, or does it only apply to a specific historical period, within specific cultural expectations?

As a case in point, how would you classify the Babylonian Chronicle P, a text that narrates events of a much earlier period. Here's a sample of the text:
Kadašman-harbe, son of Karaindaš, son of Muballitat-serua, the daughter of Aššur-uballit, king of Assyria, ordered the overthrow of the Suteans from the east to west, and annihilated their extensive forces. He reinforced the fortresses in Mount Šaršar. He dug wells and settled people on fertile lands to strengthen the guard. Afterwards the Kassite people rebelled against him and killed him. They appointed Šuzigaš, a Kassite, the son of a nobody, as sovereign over them. Aššur-uballit, king of Assyria, marched to Karduniaš, to avenge Kadašman-harbe, his daughter's son, and he killed Šuzigaš, the Kassite. Aššur-iballit put Kurigalzu, son of Kadašman-harbe, on his father's throne.
[…]
The enemy seized him. Together ... he put all of them to the sword, and he did not leave a soul. Those who were fallen, they put in distress. They coloured the midst of the rolling sea with their blood. They sent out their troops, fought zealously, and achieved victory. They subdued the enemy troops. He gathered the possessions of the vast enemy and made piles of them. Again the warriors said: "We did not know, Kurigalzu, that you had conquered all peoples. We had no rival among people. Now you [have overcome us] We have set out, sought the place where you are and brought gifts. We have helped you conquer ..."
[…]
... Tukulti-Ninurta returned to Babylon and brought ... near. He destroyed the wall of Babylon and put the Babylonians to the sword. He took out the property of the Esagila and Babylon amid the booty. He removed the statue of the great lord Marduk from his dwelling-place and sent him to Assyria. He put his governors in Karduniaš. For seven years, Tukulti-Ninurta controlled Karduniaš. After the Akkadian officers of Karduniaš had rebelled and put Adad-šuma-ušur on his father's throne, Aššur-nasir-apli, son of that Tukulti-Ninurta who had carried criminal designs against Babylon, and the officers of Assyria rebelled against Tukulti-Ninurta, removed him from the throne, shut him up in Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta and killed him.
This clearly contains none of the rhetoric that Greek historians employed, so it manifestly isn't history writing in the Greek - or your - sense. But do you therefore think that whoever wrote or compiled this text believed he was creating "fiction"? Or that his readers, whoever they were, read it as "fiction"? I very, very much doubt it. And if it's not history and not fiction, what is it?
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neilgodfrey
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Plutarch's Theseus and the Mythical Past

Post by neilgodfrey »

There are several points to address both in your and Paul's comments and I'd prefer address each point in separate comments rather than tackling a too much in very long comments. I'll attempt to address your interesting point about Theseus in this one.
austendw wrote:
neilgodfrey wrote:You have given the answer to the problem you raise. That's the "beauty" of the historical style -- the sources are stated and assessed for their reliability or otherwise.
I'm not actually sure that Plutarch does assess the "reliability or otherwise" of the narratives he transmits. In the Life of Theseus he actually pleads indulgence from his reader: he implies that it may all be legend, but that's what you have to accept when you are dealing with stories from ancient times. But he certainly won't let the fact that some or all of the story is probably made up prevent him from telling the story anyway... as if it really happened. (I suspect that the way some ancient cultures took this "indulgent" view of their own ancient history is significant, and explains how the further back into the past one went the more legendary and fanciful the narratives became... without anyone signalling the changes in any significant way.)
Plutarch begins his Life of Theseus:
now that I have traversed those periods of time which are accessible to probable reasoning and which afford basis for a history dealing with facts, I might well say of the earlier periods: "What lies beyond is full of marvels and unreality, a land of poets and fabulists, of doubt and obscurity."
For Plutarch as with other ancient writers there was a time beyond knowable "history" -- back to the time of heroes and even beyond that to the gods. Plutarch recognized that he was dealing with different types of sources and type of knowledge from the topics of relatively recent events or knowable history.

The time of Theseus is a time of "marvels and unreality, a land of poets and fabulists".

And then
May I therefore succeed in purifying Fable, making her submit to reason and take on the semblance of History. But where she obstinately disdains to make herself credible, and refuses to admit any element of probability, I shall pray for kindly readers, and such as receive with indulgence the tales of antiquity.
Plutarch undertakes to try to tease out something that looks like history by means of rationalising the mythical tale. We can even say he's a precursor of those biblical scholars and rationalists who like to salvage history from the miracles of the Bible: the exodus crossing of the Red Sea happened, for example, but it was merely a low tide and not as the Bible says, etc.

At least Plutarch does not boast that he is extracting genuine history from the myth by means of rationalisation. He concedes all he is doing is creating "an appearance of history", or "semblance of history".

Plutarch acknowledges that everything he is writing is a "maybe". That's okay for him because his intention is to compare an appropriate Greek figure with Romulus and to "teach and delight" his audiences with valuable moral lessons. He admits he is not writing genuine biography or history as he was able to in the case of, say, Cicero.

From both the modern perspective of history and the ancient one, by Plutarch's own testimony, we can dismiss everything he says about Theseus as a mere "semblance of history" and not real history.

(Plutarch is not gullible in the sense that some people seem to think ancients were so gullible that they could not tell the difference between ancient mythical tales and recent "historical" events.)
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neilgodfrey
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

Post by neilgodfrey »

Thanks for this feedback. Great points for discussion....
austendw wrote:However what does bother me is the context in which this definition is made: the binary opposition of "history" and "fiction". You imply that these are the only two options. I don't have much of an argument with saying that if a writer employs this rhetoric both the writer intends for his readers to know he's doing history. But does that mean that if he does not employ that rhetoric it follows that the writer and his readers know he must be writing fiction?
There is sometimes room for doubt, too. A story can have such an impact that readers will want to know, "Is that true?" By asking the question they are implying that they need more information in order to know if it is "really history". Without that additional information, it can never be accepted as "history".

austendw wrote:More importantly still, do you believe that this distinction is a transhistorical function of all literature, or does it only apply to a specific historical period, within specific cultural expectations?
Yes, "this distinction is a transhistorical function of all literature".

Different cultural expectations will presumably supply different literary devices but their functions will serve the same ends: distinguishing between "fact" and "fiction".
austendw wrote:As a case in point, how would you classify the Babylonian Chronicle P, a text that narrates events of a much earlier period. Here's a sample of the text:
Kadašman-harbe, son of Karaindaš, son of Muballitat-serua, the daughter of Aššur-uballit, king of Assyria, ordered the overthrow of the Suteans from the east to west, and annihilated their extensive forces. He reinforced the fortresses in Mount Šaršar. He dug wells and settled people on fertile lands to strengthen the guard. Afterwards the Kassite people rebelled against him and killed him. They appointed Šuzigaš, a Kassite, the son of a nobody, as sovereign over them. Aššur-uballit, king of Assyria, marched to Karduniaš, to avenge Kadašman-harbe, his daughter's son, and he killed Šuzigaš, the Kassite. Aššur-iballit put Kurigalzu, son of Kadašman-harbe, on his father's throne.
[…]
The enemy seized him. Together ... he put all of them to the sword, and he did not leave a soul. Those who were fallen, they put in distress. They coloured the midst of the rolling sea with their blood. They sent out their troops, fought zealously, and achieved victory. They subdued the enemy troops. He gathered the possessions of the vast enemy and made piles of them. Again the warriors said: "We did not know, Kurigalzu, that you had conquered all peoples. We had no rival among people. Now you [have overcome us] We have set out, sought the place where you are and brought gifts. We have helped you conquer ..."
[…]
... Tukulti-Ninurta returned to Babylon and brought ... near. He destroyed the wall of Babylon and put the Babylonians to the sword. He took out the property of the Esagila and Babylon amid the booty. He removed the statue of the great lord Marduk from his dwelling-place and sent him to Assyria. He put his governors in Karduniaš. For seven years, Tukulti-Ninurta controlled Karduniaš. After the Akkadian officers of Karduniaš had rebelled and put Adad-šuma-ušur on his father's throne, Aššur-nasir-apli, son of that Tukulti-Ninurta who had carried criminal designs against Babylon, and the officers of Assyria rebelled against Tukulti-Ninurta, removed him from the throne, shut him up in Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta and killed him.
This clearly contains none of the rhetoric that Greek historians employed, so it manifestly isn't history writing in the Greek - or your - sense. But do you therefore think that whoever wrote or compiled this text believed he was creating "fiction"? Or that his readers, whoever they were, read it as "fiction"? I very, very much doubt it. And if it's not history and not fiction, what is it?
Historians will rightly argue that there is a difference between a chronicle (as above) and a narrative history (as Thucydides) but you raise a good point. We are talking about what material we today can decide is "historical" or from which we can extract historical events so the Bab Chronicles are a great case study.

I would not call the Chronicles "history" as such but primary sources from which historians can attempt to recreate history. But that begs the question: how does the historian know if they are "fiction" or "fact"; should they be used as a tool to reconstruct history at all?

The information contained in the Chronicles is presented "or framed" in the standard chronicle style. (They do not read like the Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, with descriptive and imaginative narrative details.) We also have the additional "framing" of the context of the information in these chronicles that comes in the form of external or independent confirmation for the historicity of some of the names and their roles. We have not just one but many such chronicles to help us grasp their function as records of political events.

How much detail is "completely true" I don't know. Liverani censured his fellow ancient historians for lazily swallowing similar Hittite chronicles at face value and repeating them all as "history". Liverani showed how the chronicles were more propaganda riddled with half-truths and misleading statements. That is, he showed that the Hittite Chronicles were more like coins, other artefacts, inscriptions, that were the primary sources from which historians formed judgments and created historical narratives.

In one sense the Hittite chronicles are a form of historical writing insofar as they are presented by their authors as "real events" in order for readers to accept them as "true" -- not unlike the function of imperial coins.

But as with all "evidence" it is the modern historian's task to test it, to interpret it, etc.
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Context is everything

Post by neilgodfrey »

Paul the Uncertain wrote: Ah, I didn't appreciate that you'd argue against that any meeting between Curtius Rufus and a tall African beauty took place. I'm open to that much being true, because with or without knowing that Pliny brings this up while writing about the supernatural, any supernatural interpretations are easily separated from the narrated natural events.

Storytellers lard up already cool stories with cosmic significance all the time. Nevertheless, cool stuff happens now and then.
Here is the Curtius Rufus story without any explicit framing by Pliny or any other external reference:
When [Curtius Rufus] was in low circumstances and unknown in the world, he attended the governor of Africa into that province. One evening, as he was walking in the public portico, there appeared to him the figure of a woman, of unusual size and of beauty more than human. And as he stood there, terrified and astonished, she told him she was the tutelary power that presided over Africa, and was come to inform him of the future events of his life: that he should go back to Rome, to enjoy high honours there, and return to that province invested with the proconsular dignity, and there should die. Every circumstance of this prediction actually came to pass. . . . .
If we had only that narrative on a piece of ancient parchment or papyrus preserved in a desert monastery we have no way to infer that we are reading "history".

The entire piece leaves us bereft of any hint of historicity. It is simply a story. We have no reason to believe there was a Curtius Rufus or that he met a suprahuman woman etc.

"True" information, or "historical" information, requires confirmation, some sort of assurance or independent testimony that it is "true". That applies at all levels, from national epics right down to whether it really was the butler who murdered the heiress or not.

As children we believe what we are told but as adults we learn that we need confirmation. Yesterday I read an apologist's article trying to say this was not true. Bauckham said the same (and I think he was misinterpreting Ricoeur). The article has this all too common howler:
If my wife tells me that there are apples in the refrigerator, I will not approach the matter with the assumption that her claim is false until I check for myself. If a perfect stranger tells me that there has just been a serious accident on the nearby interstate, then in the absence of further evidence, I will probably accept his assertion.
The fallacy in the first instance, the statement by the wife, is that it overlooks our reasons for believing a spouse when she makes a mundane statement about available food and how different those reasons are from the reasons we accept or reject something in a book. We have context with our spouse. We have pretty good ideas what to expect from some people we have spent a lot of time with. Further, we are brought up in domestic situations where we learn that certain statements about daily routines etc are trustable.

Ditto the second example with the stranger. We are conditioned to know what to expect from neighbours and other people in our respective societies or communities in different contexts such as factors affecting daily commuting.

But when it comes to studying primary sources from different cultures and times we have a completely different ball game. We need to do a lot of study and wide reading to learn how to interpret certain materials. I believe detectives or police need to make a lot of inquiries in order to test and establish testimony before bringing charges.

And when it comes to the Curtius Rufus story we have no way of knowing if there is any historicity behind it without some sort of independent confirmation.

Lacking that independent confirmation it can never be accepted as historical to any extent at all. And the fact that it contains a suprahuman figure and miraculous prophecies sets it prima facie in the class of fiction.

Sure it "might" be true, some parts of it, if we rationalise it and remove the miraculous details etc, but then we have a very different story from the one we are reading and no means to confirm its "historicity".

We sometimes ask of a story, "Is it true?" The question is raised because we want more information in order to know whether or not it is "history".

History, like a murder conviction, can never be established without independent confirmation of some sort.
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austendw
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Re: Plutarch's Theseus and the Mythical Past

Post by austendw »

neilgodfrey wrote:For Plutarch as with other ancient writers there was a time beyond knowable "history" -- back to the time of heroes and even beyond that to the gods. Plutarch recognized that he was dealing with different types of sources and type of knowledge from the topics of relatively recent events or knowable history.
Exactly.
neilgodfrey wrote:Plutarch undertakes to try to tease out something that looks like history by means of rationalising the mythical tale. We can even say he's a precursor of those biblical scholars and rationalists who like to salvage history from the miracles of the Bible: the exodus crossing of the Red Sea happened, for example, but it was merely a low tide and not as the Bible says, etc.
Well perhaps he does rationalise to an extent - tries to give the tales the benefit of the doubt where he can - but he doesn't try that hard. He doesn't insist that "this is the real truth behind the myth"; he says simply: "this is what they tell" and leaves it up to the viewer to be indulgent towards the implausibility or not.
neilgodfrey wrote:Plutarch is not gullible in the sense that some people seem to think ancients were so gullible that they could not tell the difference between ancient mythical tales and recent "historical" events.
I agree with that as long as one doesn't construe to mean: recent history was "true" and ancient mythical tales were "false" in exactly the same way that a true story about recent history could be (in principle) distinguished from a false one. The further back in time you went, the less possible it was to insist on either the actuality or falsity of any story. The distant past was "beyond certainty" - nothing could be certainly true or untrue (which unsurprisingly acted as a licence for the fantastic imagination) and to say "this really did happen" or "this certainly didn't happen", was essentially meaningless. All one could say - and therefore all one needed to say - was "this is what is told..."
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Context is everything, 2

Post by neilgodfrey »

Paul the Uncertain wrote: I'd propose a different approach, maybe an "index of historical construction," rather than try for a classifier. Scholarly works about the human past would easily score high, shamelessly vulgar works of never-never fantasy would score low.

Hard cases (Tom Wolfe's novels) could be mined for possible second (or more) dimension(s) of disambiguation. If you were lucky, then your suite of dimensional scores might be cast as a classifier after all, but with several categories (like Myers-Briggs or "Five Factor Model" personality classes) rather than just two.

Under this approach
I have been addressing various literary devices (of which self-identification is but one)
Pliny would get some points for identifying himself. Mark is a little trickier, since we don't know whether or not he identified himself, but we could probably make an adjustment for our confidence in evaluating factors. If that's just one factor among many, and the end result isn't a classification anyway, all is not lost even if we get a few wrong.
The problem I see with this approach is that it makes judgements about discrete literary devices independently of context.

Take the device of a narrator telling the reader their name. That alone cannot be a factor either for or against historicity. We cannot say "2 points for historicity" and "2 against fiction" for such a literary feature. We know that both fictional and historical works contain narrator names and many times both are without narrative names.

Without some context external to the piece of writing how could we know if the name is fictional or real or who it represents, etc.?

A narrator name tells us nothing without some other context, either internal or external. At some point we will need contextual information external to the document we are reading in order to assess the "historicity" of its content.
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Re: Plutarch's Theseus and the Mythical Past

Post by neilgodfrey »

austendw wrote: Well perhaps he does rationalise to an extent - tries to give the tales the benefit of the doubt where he can - but he doesn't try that hard. He doesn't insist that "this is the real truth behind the myth"; he says simply: "this is what they tell" and leaves it up to the viewer to be indulgent towards the implausibility or not.
Of course Plutarch was not approaching his subject with the mind of a modern biographer or historian. He was writing for ethical purposes, to draw comparative lessons of character, not to research and uncover and present "the historical Theseus".

Ancient historians tended to do this. They didn't always worry too much about making stuff up if it served the moral purpose of their narrative.
austendw wrote:
neilgodfrey wrote:Plutarch is not gullible in the sense that some people seem to think ancients were so gullible that they could not tell the difference between ancient mythical tales and recent "historical" events.
I agree with that as long as one doesn't construe to mean: recent history was "true" and ancient mythical tales were "false" in exactly the same way that a true story about recent history could be (in principle) distinguished from a false one.
Agreed. There is always "good history" and "bad history", and many histories contain mistakes, even of fact. And modern historical interests and methods are very different from those of ancient historians. Hence the modern historian's or reader's need to test what is read.
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

Post by Paul the Uncertain »

Neil

If all I have is a scrap of papyrus with the Curtius Rufus story scrawled on it, then we agree that I couldn't confidently tell solely from the characteristics of the text whether it was intended as a truth-respecting account of the human past or a fictional story.

That's what I've been advocating all along: that making such a distinction on that basis isn't generally possible.
Sure it "might" be true, some parts of it, if we rationalise it and remove the miraculous details etc,
There are no miraculous details. The woman says she's a goddess, the narrator doesn't confirm or deny. Even Rufus doesn't. Her predictions are few and not far-fetched in context. Had they not worked out, then it wouldn't be any skin off her nose years later when the results were settled.

On the other hand, the tale could easily have been made up. Nothing ever rules out fiction if we're restricted solely to characteristics of the text.

I find it curious that you catalog the "we have no reasons to believe" this and that, without pointing out that we have equally no reason to believe there wasn't a Curtius Rufus, that he wasn't a proconsul who died at his station. I suspect this has something to do with that article you read. That part of the post would make more sense to me if I knew what article you were talking about.

But no matter; our shared verdict on the bare bones Curtius Rufus story is that we can't tell. Therefore it is not the case that there must be characteristics of the text, etc.

Round 2
Without some context external to the piece of writing how could we know if the name is fictional or real or who it represents, etc.?
If we aren't classifying (and for two people who've chewed up a load of bandwidth, I really don't see that we disagree about the general impossibility of classifying based solely on the text), then why would it bother us that we can't know?

High scores would go not exclusively to histories (else we could build the classifier after all) but to "apparent histories." We could give some thought to what uses the pattern of scores might have. Who knows? We might discover that few histories end up with very low scores, or that even despite its not being necessarily so by the very nature of fiction, nevertheless, empirically few fictions end up with very high scores.

Hell's bells, maybe we could define a useful (but uncertain) reference class.
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

Post by neilgodfrey »

Paul the Uncertain wrote:
Sure it "might" be true, some parts of it, if we rationalise it and remove the miraculous details etc,
There are no miraculous details. The woman says she's a goddess, the narrator doesn't confirm or deny. Even Rufus doesn't.
I see an account of "a figure of a woman" (suggesting something other than a mere woman), whose features are said to be "unusual" and "more than human" and CR goes into a terrified sweat when he sees her -- these are all conventions indicating the meeting a "goddess" as she claims to be.

Paul the Uncertain wrote:Her predictions are few and not far-fetched in context. Had they not worked out, then it wouldn't be any skin off her nose years later when the results were settled.
I don't believe in fortune telling.

But even if the tale were of the nonmiraculous kind it we would still have no reason to believe it is historical from the narrative alone.
Paul the Uncertain wrote:On the other hand, the tale could easily have been made up. Nothing ever rules out fiction if we're restricted solely to characteristics of the text.
Yes, agreed.
Paul the Uncertain wrote:I find it curious that you catalog the "we have no reasons to believe" this and that, without pointing out that we have equally no reason to believe there wasn't a Curtius Rufus, that he wasn't a proconsul who died at his station. I suspect this has something to do with that article you read. That part of the post would make more sense to me if I knew what article you were talking about.
I do include not having any reason to believe in a real Curtius Rufus. Without any context we have no way of knowing if the name is historical or otherwise.

It's nothing to do with my article. It's the sort of thing I have meant to indicate from the beginning.
Paul the Uncertain wrote:But no matter; our shared verdict on the bare bones Curtius Rufus story is that we can't tell. Therefore it is not the case that there must be characteristics of the text, etc.
In this case we are reading the story without what I suggest are the literary framing and contextual factors that allow us to read the story as a form of historical reporting.

The characteristics of framing, context, are all-important -- they are the only way we can decide what the "historical" status of the story is.

Add those characteristics and contexts and we can see that the story was indeed very probably told to Pliny and caused Pliny to wonder about ghosts. We know Pliny seems inclined to believe the story. That is the story's place in "history".

Had Pliny given more details about how he came by the story and the evidence upon which specific details were based then we might have a clearer idea if there was any "historical core" to the original story also.

Without those extra details it is just a story with no possibility of being accorded "historical status" to any degree.
Paul the Uncertain wrote:
Round 2

High scores would go not exclusively to histories (else we could build the classifier after all) but to "apparent histories."
I don't see on what basis we could ever give any score for the mere fact of a narrator naming him/herself in a piece of writing. The simple fact of a narrator's name appearing means nothing either for historicity or fiction.

I have spoken about personal identification, but that's much more than a mere name. Identification of a person outside the text necessarily involves contextual references that are external to the text as well as certain kinds of literary references. And the literary devices are indeed often imitated in fiction for the sake of verisimilitude (as distinct from veracity.) We need more than the words in the text alone -- even if those words include a narrator's name.
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Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?

Post by Paul the Uncertain »

Neil
I see an account of "a figure of a woman" (suggesting something other than a mere woman), whose features are said to be "unusual" and "more than human" and CR goes into a terrified sweat when he sees her
He's young and she's gorgeous. That all sounds pretty natural to me. There are conventions about it, too. One is to vastly overestimate the lust-object's merits, while overlooking her shortcomings (for example, that she acts much as a real-life con artist behaves when snaring a mark).
I don't believe in fortune telling.
You don't believe that some people offer to tell fortunes, or you don't believe that anybody succeeds in fortune telling more than can be achieved by natural means?

Only the former occurs on the page under scrutiny.
But even if the tale were of the nonmiraculous kind ...
But that's where the framing came in. Pliny spun it as a real-life miracle. By itself, the story could be propaganda about how a tutelary goddess legitimized Roman administration in her region. Or it's a comment on youthful Rufus' gullibility, or what inspired him to turn his life around from young loser to mature mover and shaker.

It isn't just that we'd lose information about the story's well-foundedness, we'd also lose the point of telling it.
It's nothing to do with my article.
Good. I was concerned that maybe I'd missed something.
In this case we are reading the story without what I suggest are the literary framing and contextual factors that allow us to read the story as a form of historical reporting.
OK, in your estimation, the story by itself is a non-starter as history, so the Pliny-Sura setting rehabilitates it, and makes a big change in your estimate of its status. In my estimation, it has no defects as possible history, but also little to recommend it as history, either. That Pliny says he heard it makes no dramatic change for me. Pliny can hear history or fiction with equal ease, it seems to me.

The context also falls short for me because Pliny needs easily understood illustrations of what he's talking about more than he needs extensively verified true examples. Pliny is plainly trying to begin a conversation here, not resolve anything based on his exhaustive research.
I don't see on what basis we could ever give any score for the mere fact of a narrator naming him/herself in a piece of writing. The simple fact of a narrator's name appearing means nothing either for historicity or fiction.
I'm not following you here. Whether or not the author is identified is a textual characteristic which you brought up (as well as anonymity being a well-known characteristic of Gospels). I thought you were saying it meant something.

Obviously, if you recognize the name, and the style more or less matches other texts that bear the same name, etc. then that's a different situation from when you don't recognize the name at all. In a text-scoring scheme, we can award or subtract points for that, too.
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