326 sharon kinoshita
If, as Michael Herzfeld suggests (2005; also this volume), the Mediterranean’s
utility as an analytical category declines in inverse proportion to its adoption as a self-
essentializing label, then taken together, these literary and musical examples must
indeed signify its near exhaustion. On the other hand, if it is the recent colonial past
that “continues to shape the ways in which we understand the modern histories of the
eastern and southern Mediterranean ... apart from the history of the western and
northern Mediterranean” (Burke, 2013: 924), then considering the contents,
contexts, and trajectories of pre-modern texts maps some of the terrain that such a
reterritorialized history might take.
Endnotes1 Comparative Literature—the place for the study of broader links between literary traditions—
has, as traditionally constituted, largely been limited to the languages of (western) Europe,
and tends to privilege textual phenomena (genre, motifs, or styles), over historical or cultural
processes.
2 Alternatively, texts are studied through formal criteria (like genre) or theoretically-based
thematics (like gender or animal studies, to name only a few)—sometimes articulated in
relationship to historically and culturally specific circumstances, and sometimes not.
3 The Seven Sages of Rome is one branch of an even more complex text network. Earliest
known in Arabic under the name Sendebar (though possibly, like Barlaam, with South
Asian and Middle Persian antecedents), this is a frame tale in which the fate of a young
prince, under an interdiction of silence after being accused of attempting to seduce his step-
mother, is contested by dueling tales told by the queen, on the one hand, and, in the
prince’s defense, by his tutor (named Sendebar or Sindbad), on the other. In subsequent
versions, the prince’s defenders are multiplied into the Seven Vezirs (Arabic) or the Seven
Sages of Rome (Latin); Greek (Syntipas) and Hebrew (Mischle Sendebar) versions played
important, if uncertain, roles in its transmission into western European languages. One
Latin version (subsequently translated into Old French) names the tale Dolopathos, after the
king; a Castilian translation from the Arabic Sendebar was made in 1252 by Don Fadrique,
brother of Alfonso X the Wise under the title Libro de los Engaños.
4 For Kalila and Dimna, see Paker and Toska (1997) (Turkish), Reynolds (2006a) and
Wacks (2007) (Castilian), Kinoshita (2008b) (Latin).
5 See Mallette (2005) for similar analyses of medieval Sicily, and, for Cyprus, Grivaud (2005).
6 Arabic song is sometimes thought to have influenced the development of troubadour verse,
especially through the Iberian adventures of Count William IX of Aquitaine, the earliest
attested troubadour (Dodds, Menocal, and Balbale, 2008: 105–109).
7 Callimachus was born in the Greek colony of Cyrene on the Libyan coast (one of the sites
mentioned in the Greco–Latin romance Apollonius of Tyre, discussed below) and subse-
quently attached to the great library at Alexandria. The poem survives in the Latin transla-
tion of the first century bce poet Catullus.
8 It also rewrites Herodotus’s telling of the marriage of Amasis (last native Egyptian pharaoh
before the Persian conquest) to Ladike, another woman from Cyrene who likewise made a
vow to Aphrodite (in exchange for a cure to her husband’s impotence (Selden, 1998:
330–331).
9 Ephesus is the setting of An Ephesian Tale, Mitylene of Daphnis and Chloe. Cyrene, as
we have seen, plays a role in the Lock of Berenice; see also Horden and Purcell (2000:
65–74). On the Hellenistic romance as a peculiar subset of text network, with a reading
of Kallirhoe as a dialectical antithesis of the Alexander Romance, see Selden (2012:
41–47).