Through her tireless research and quest for answers, an even larger narrative unfolds. As he becomes radicalized, he decides to take an action that will put him in direct conflict with eighty-six-year-old Zeno, an amateur translator and a former Korean prisoner-of-war, who is working with five children on a play adaptation of Aethon’s adventures in the local library.įinally, in the distant future, a young girl named Konstance becomes trapped alone in a vault with access to a virtual and possibly infinite library. Meanwhile, a boy named Seymour in present-day Lakeport, Idaho, is devastated when a forest that he loves is razed to make room for a housing development. After Omeir and his oxen are conscripted into the Ottoman army to help drag a super-cannon (one of the largest cannons ever constructed) to attack Constantinople, his path and Anna’s intersect. There’s Omeir, an oxherd from the mountains of what we now call Bulgaria, who grows up on a diet of his grandfather’s whimsical fables. She chafes against her over-structured life, and longs to learn to read. There’s Anna, who lives and works in an embroidery house in 15th century Constantinople. What is it about seemingly every human generation in seemingly every culture that we tell stories about traveling to better, prettier, more equitable places in far-off lands?Ī: It consists, really, of five novels-in-one, each braided around the others, and each of Cloud Cuckoo Land’s five protagonists are connected through time by a sixth novel: an ancient text by Antonius Diogenes (that I invented) about a shepherd’s comical journey to a utopian city in the sky.
#Antonius diogenes full
In my novel, I hope to embrace the full range of contemporary and historical meanings of the phrase, from a beautiful utopia where there is no suffering, to an absurd and over-optimistic fantasy.
“A True Story,” to a 1925 Robert Graves poem (“ Kingfishers, when they die, To far Cloud-Cuckoo pastures fly”), to the 2014 LEGO movie. In the centuries since, a ‘cloud cuckoo land’ has been used to describe any number of fanciful worlds, employed in works from Lucian’s second-century A.D. In “The Birds,” two heroes, Trustyfriend and Goodhope, decide to leave Athens because it has become too corrupt, and-with the help of the world’s birds-build a better city in the sky, halfway between the realm of humans and the realm of the gods. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.A: ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ ( Νεϕελοκοκκυγία) was a phrase invented by the comic playwright Aristophanes’ 2,400 years ago in “The Birds,” one his few plays that survives to this day. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press.
Once perceived as a late and insignificant development, the novel emerges as a central and revealing cultural phenomenon of the Greco-Roman world after Alexander.
Intended for scholars as well as nonspecialists, this work provides new editions of the texts, full translations whenever possible, and introductions that situate each text within the field of ancient fiction and that present relevant background material, literary parallels, and possible lines of interpretation.Ĭollective reading of the fragments exposes the inadequacy of many currently held assumptions about the ancient novel, among these, for example, the paradigm for a linear, increasingly complex narrative development, the notion of the “ideal romantic” novel as the generic norm, and the nature of the novel’s readership and cultural milieu. In this volume Susan Stephens and John Winkler have reedited all of the identifiable novel fragments, including the epitomes of Iamblichos’ Babyloniaka and Antonius Diogenes’ Incredible Things Beyond Thule. The recent discovery of fragments from such novels as Iolaos, Phoinikika, Sesonchosis, and Metiochos and Parthenope has dramatically increased the library catalogue of ancient novels, calling for a fresh survey of the field.
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