Abstract:

Scholars tend to draw attention to the characteristics shared by various texts considered “open”, “pluriform”, “fluid” or even “lowbrow literature”, such as, especially, the Life of Alexander by Pseudo-Callisthenes, the Life of Aesop, or some Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, particularly those of Paul, Peter and Thomas. Undoubtedly, the fluidity of this type of texts explains well some of their compositional devices and the complex vicissitudes of their transmission, but it is important not to lose sight of the fact that their redactors come from a common rhetorical training and that the expectations of their audience were also very similar, with the differences for each work that should not be ignored, of course, but that, in any case, allow to trace some significant common trends. To prove this, I will consider the fluctuation between some of these works of an essentially novel narrative material: the sale of the protagonists as slaves, with the frequent presence of kidnappings by pirates.