You are reading a different story -- or reading into the story an alternative to the one written. We cannot just assume that the narrator (not Curtius Rufus) is exaggerating or writing something other than he really means. We have not context -- we just have to accept the story as it is on the page.Paul the Uncertain wrote: 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).
This is where we seem to differ quite often. I understand you seem to assume that an author could be meaning something other than what he is writing or there is something else behind the text etc. Yes, there may be other things behind texts, but we can never just assume that. We always need to work with the text as we have it to begin with, and then let the textual and contextual cues guide us in any other interpretation and views about what we are reading or what might be behind it. Otherwise I think we are just making stuff up for no good reason.
I don't believe in "figures" appearing as humans yet looking more than human and scaring the daylights out of people exist nor that they or anyone else can accurately predict futures such as we read is predicted of CR's life.Paul the Uncertain wrote: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?I don't believe in fortune telling.
Only the former occurs on the page under scrutiny.
But that is ultimately beside the point. Even if she said something else, like "Hello, can you show me the way to the fish market?" or anything -- we would have no way of determining the historicity of the narrative.
We can't say that it could be any of those things. We can't say or think it might be propaganda or a comment on someone's gullibility or anything. We can only read the story and accept it as it is. We have no way of interpreting it in ways you suggest it "could be" without external and contextual guides. We are looking at the tale without those guides and contexts. By itself we have no justification for suspecting it is propaganda or a psychological commentary or anything other than what we read.Paul the Uncertain wrote: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.But even if the tale were of the nonmiraculous kind ...
But we have no way of establishing any "point of telling it" without contextual guides that we have removed for the point of this exercise.Paul the Uncertain wrote:It isn't just that we'd lose information about the story's well-foundedness, we'd also lose the point of telling it.
My point was identification of the author. Naming is one of the ways that happens but tossing in a name alone doesn't identify anyone. Names only identify if we know who that name represents, etc. (I'm reminded of Ehrman's howler when he said a photograph would prove historicity. That's idiocy. A photograph is meaningless without context -- without external and contextual information telling us about the person in the photo.Paul the Uncertain wrote: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.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.
You are getting closer to my point. Yes, if the name matches other texts bearing the same name then that's external context. We also need to have some assurance that we have legitimate reasons to match the name in the text with the same name elsewhere.Paul the Uncertain wrote: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.