Did the Ancient Greek Novels Have Characters?

Reviewed by: Four Byzantine Novels by Elizabeth Jeffreys Steven Moore (bio) Elizabeth Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels. Translated with Introductions and Notes by Jeffreys. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2012 (Distributed in the US by the U of Chicago P). 488pp. $120, cloth. For the Greekless reader, this long-awaited anthology provides an important link between the ancient Greek novel and the novels we read today. The Greeks created what we now call novels at the beginning of the Common Era, peaking in the fourth century with the greatest of them, Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story. Eight complete novels survive, along with fragments from a dozen or so others, all conveniently gathered in B. P. Reardon’s Collected Ancient Greek Novels (University of California Press, 1989). When the best of them were rediscovered and translated during the Renaissance, they provided the template for the European novel of the early-modern period, as Margret Doody has demonstrated in The True Story of the Novel (Rutgers University Press, 1996). However, few readers are aware that in twelfth-century Byzantium, a handful of writers revived the ancient Greek novel and put their own spin on the genre. What is most striking is how modern, even postmodern, these medieval novels sound. Like Barth and Pynchon imitating the eighteenth-century novel in The Sot-Weed Factor and Mason & Dixon, respectively, the Byzantines set their novels in the past and artificially imitated the Greek of antiquity rather than their own vernacular, all while having some metafictional fun with older forms of fiction and diction. Jeffreys translates and annotates the four that have survived (as in the case with ancient Greek novels, more were undoubtedly written but have disappeared.) The earliest, a novel in verse entitled Rhodanthe and Dosikles, was composed probably in the early 1130s by Theodore Prodromos. [End Page 237] Like Nabokov in Laughter in the Dark, he tells us upfront what his novel will be about, a rehash of the standard topoi of earlier Greek novels: These [are the adventures] of the silvery girl Rhodanthe with the lovely garland and of the valiant and comely youth Dosikles, the flights and wanderings and tempests and billows, brigands, grievous eddies, sorrows that give rise to love, chains and indissoluble fetters and imprisonments in gloomy dungeons, grim sacrifices, bitter grief, poisoned cups and paralysis of joints, and then marriage and the marriage bed and passionate love. (20) Structurally and thematically similar to Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story, Rhodanthe and Dosikles is essentially a vehicle for various rhetorical set pieces, an opportunity for Prodromos to show off his skill and knowledge and occasionally to make fun of the conventions of the genre. (These novels were read aloud at the imperial court and in the literary salons of Constantinople; they were literally performance pieces. Like ballets, they do not so much tell a story as perform one.) Although nowhere near as complex and ingenious as Heliodorus, Prodromos manages to say some interesting things about dream psychology, military theory, and statecraft while performing elegant variations on the ancient theme of ideal lovers who elope, are separated and suffer various setbacks, and are eventually reunited and married. Narrower in scope but much sexier, Hysmine and Hysminias was written in prose during the 1140s or ’50s and is attributed to Eumathios Makrembolites. Modeled on the second-best of the ancient Greek novels, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (late second century), this one is the first-person account of how a young herald named Hysminias met and fell in love with a remarkably forward young woman named Hysmine. Struck by the similarity between their names, and delegated to the ceremony of washing his feet, Hysmine goes for it: The maiden Hysmine, crouching down by my feet and talking hold of them, washes them in the water (this is an honour accorded to heralds); she holds them, she clasps them, she embraces them, she presses them, she kisses them silently and sneaks a kiss; eventually she scratches me with her fingernails and tickles me. (183) [End Page 238] Not surprisingly, Hysminias has an erotic dream that night about her, the first of many in this R-rated novel. Though they engage in some heavy petting, both agree to save...

This work establishes and explores connections between Greek imperial literature and Latin poetry. As such, it challenges conventional thinking about literary and cultural interaction of the period, which assumes that imperial Greeks are not much interested in Roman cultural products (especially literature). Instead, it argues that Latin poetry is a crucially important frame of reference for Greek imperial literature. This has significant ramifications, bearing on the question of bilingual allusion and intertextuality, as well as on that of cultural interaction during the imperial period more generally. The argument mobilizes the Greek novels—a literary form that flourished under the Roman Empire, offering narratives of love, separation, and eventual reunion in and around the Mediterranean basin—as a series of case studies. Three of these novels in particular—Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius’ Clitophon and Leucippe, and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe—are analysed for the extent to which they allude to Latin poetry, and for the effects (literary and ideological) of such allusion. After an Introduction that establishes the cultural context and parameters of the study, each chapter pursues the strategies of an individual novelist in connection with Latin poetry: Chariton and Latin love elegy (Chapter 1); Chariton and Ovidian epistles and exilic poetry (Chapter 2); Chariton and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 3); Achilles Tatius and Latin love elegy (Chapter 4); Achilles Tatius and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 5); Achilles Tatius and the theme of bodily destruction in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and Seneca’s Phaedra (Chapter 6); Longus and Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid (Chapter 7). The work offers the first book-length study of the role of Latin literature in Greek literary culture under the empire and thus provides fresh perspectives and new approaches to the literature and culture of this period.

This chapter deals with late sixteenth- to early seventeenth-century French and English novels modeled directly or indirectly on ancient Greek prose fiction. It provides detailed accounts of the papyrus record, the ancient readership and, finally, the reception of the ancient Greek novel during the Byzantine period. Besides being charismatic teachers, Tissard and Aleandro ensured that the infrastructure to support the teaching of Greek in France was firmly in place. Arnyot's accomplishments as a pioneer in the formulation of the theory of the novel have a greater claim on our attention than his philological achievements. Ancient Greek novels, particularly that of Heliodorus, had already been discovered, studied, translated, plundered and adapted in France. Like the English language itself, English-language narrative fiction of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries that displays traces of the ancient Greek novels tends to be an amalgam of various components. Keywords: ancient Greek novel; Byzantine period; English language

This article discusses three trial scenes from three different ancient Greek novels (by Chariton, Achilles Tatius, and Longus), in which naïve justice seems to be deliberately subverted. The titular concept of “naïve justice” is defined here in terms borrowed from Aristotle’s Poetics, where the term “double resolution” is used, disparagingly, of plots in which the good characters are all rewarded and the bad characters all punished. The argument is made that the trial scenes under discussion should raise doubts in the reader’s mind as to which of the parties is truly guilty, and which is truly innocent. This can be seen as a reflection of unexpectedly mature ethical sensibilities on the part of these often-underestimated writers, who seem to have grasped that the “double resolution” may make the reader feel good, but has little to do with the real world.

332 PHOENIX Charite in the Metamorphoses (whose fictional narrator, Lucius, claims to be related to Plutarch). Two chapters look at marriage, and its usefulness, in philosophical discourse. Geert Roskam, in “Epicurus on Marriage,” sees Epicurus as “a principled but open-minded opponent ” of marriage (120), who nevertheless understood that there were cases where even the philosopher will marry. Examples of such rare exceptions can be seen in Epicurus’ own will, where he enjoins his heirs to care for the sons of two of his followers and to provide for the daughter of one of them (which in the Greek world would have meant a good marriage). Alex Dressler’s “The Impossible Feminism of ‘Seneca, OnMarriage’ ” discusses the lost treatise on marriage of the Roman Stoic Seneca, known only through its later excerpting in Jerome’s vicious anti-marriage polemic Against Jovinian. Seneca/Jerome offers anecdotes illustrating the pudicitia (“female honor”) of Roman women such as Cato the Younger’s daughter “Marcia,” who used an elegant bon mot criticizing men who marry for wealth to justify her refusal to remarry, or the wife who did not realize her husband had terrible halitosis because she had no experience of any other man’s breath. Women who preferred a violent self-inflicted death to the dishonor of sexual defilement (like Lucretia or Polyxena in Seneca’s Trojan Women) are also lauded, but even Seneca’s praise of Lucretia’s pudicitia (“sexual modesty”) implies “precise limits to female agency,” which differentiate it from men’s greater agency (162). The volume closes with Silvia Montiglio’s “Erotic Desire and the Desire to Marry in the Ancient Greek Novels,” examining “the dynamics between the two poles” of erotic desire and the desire to marry (220). In the earlier novels, Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe and Xenophon’s Ephesian Tale, dating probably from the first century b.c.e./c.e., the star-crossed lovers marry at the beginning of the story, only to undergo a long separation before finally enjoying marital happiness. In the later ones, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, and Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story (second to fourth centuries c.e.), the couple do not wed until the end, after having undergone various vicissitudes. Not that there is always an expectation that erotic desire will lead to marriage: in Achilles Tatius and Longus, the idea of marriage only arises long after the couple have expressed and begun to act upon their erotic urges. Montiglio concludes that “Marriage is not a natural bond, and no novelist pretends it is” (238). This volume displays the same variety and breadth of treatment as Plutarch’s own works, and at the same time tells us much about the cultural and philosophical milieu of Plutarch and his contemporaries. Emory University Judith Evans Grubbs The Discovery of the Fact. Edited by Clifford Ando and William P. Sullivan. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. 2020. Pp. vi, 207. The distinction between facts and law is well established today, especially in common law, where it is expected that juries decide facts and judges decide law. On closer analysis, however, the distinction often breaks down and the papers in this volume are intended to participate in “the wider field of debates on the fact/law distinction in modern legal theory, in addition to the historiography of the modern fact” (3). The discussions of facts and law in the Roman law chapters are generally helpful in elucidating BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 333 the fact/law distinction and its history, but the Greek papers seem less relevant in this regard. I take the Roman papers first. Chapter Two by Nicolas Cornu Thénard brings the perspective of Continental jurisprudence to bear on “The Legal Construction of the Fact, between Rhetoric and Roman Law.” Cornu Thénard confines his study to the Roman jurists and rhetoricians. He begins with a general discussion of the jurists’ view of fact (factum) and law (ius) not as different conceptual categories, but as “two modes of reasoning, two types of argumentation that can be employed to resolve a dispute” (41). After noting Quintilian ’s discussion—laws are general, facts are unique to each case; law is finite...

This paper delves into the question of the potential addresses of ancient Greek novels. After shedding some light on the matter (based on ancient sources which account for the sociocultural underpinnings of the new genre), a classification is established in an attempt to provide a deeper understanding of alleged homogeneity in readership. The entire bibliography demonstrates a discontinuation in the conception prevalent decades ago, which, based on subjective and anachronistic interpretations, would find reinforcement in the silence of ancient sources. To make matters more intricate, the surviving information regarding how the novel was viewed in ancient times appears not to point to a prestigious status thereof. All things considered, should these presumptions alone lead us to consider the novel as a low-quality genre in terms of literary and stylistic standards? Ancient Greek novel might well be one of those cases in which literary or cultural creations have called for reassessment and revaluation several centuries following their conception.

Using a reader-oriented approach, Shadi Bartsch reconsiders the role of detailed descriptive accounts in the ancient Greek novels of Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius and in so doing offers a new view of the genre itself. Bartsch demonstrates that these passages, often misunderstood as mere ornamental devices, form in fact an integral part of the narrative proper, working to activate the audience's awareness of the play of meaning in the story. As the crucial elements in the evolution of a relationship in which the author arouses and then undermines the expectations of his readership, these passages provide the key to a better understanding and interpretation of these two most sophisticated of the ancient Greek romances.In many works of the Second Sophistic, descriptions of visual conveyors of meaning--artworks and dreams--signaled the presence of a deeper meaning. This meaning was revealed in the texts themselves through an interpretation furnished by the author. The two novels at hand, however, manipulate this convention of hermeneutic description by playing upon their readers' expectations and luring them into the trap of incorrect exegesis. Employed for different ends in the context of each work, this process has similar implications in both for the relationship between reader and author as it arises out of the former's involvement with the text.Originally published in 1989.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. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. 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.

author: Virtually nothing is known about the author. The text itself can be dated, on the basis of several ancient papyrus fragments, to the second century c.e. The plot of the novel conforms to the basic ancient Greek romance (see comments at entry 23). translation: John J. Winkler, in B. P. Reardon, ed., Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). text: LCL (S. Gaselee, 1917; rev. ed., 1969); E. Vilborg, ed., Achilles Tatius: “Leucippe and Clitophon,” 2 vols. (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell 1955–62). bibliography: See entry 23. And so, since the sanctuary of Artemis was close to the estate, she ran to it and took refuge in the temple. From ancient days this temple had been forbidden to free women who were not virgins. Only men and virgins were permitted here. If a nonvirgin woman passed inside, the penalty was death, unless she was a slave accusing her master, in which case she was allowed to beseech the goddess, and the magistrates would hear the case between her and her master. If the master had in fact done no wrong, he recovered his maidservant, swearing that he would not bear a grudge for her flight. If it was decided that the serving girl had a just case, she remained there as a slave to the goddess.

Digressions are striking features of the ancient Greek novels. They occur frequently in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Story and to a lesser degree in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe and Chariton’s Callirhoe. Far from finding the digressions ‘incontestably pleasurable’, however, many modern readers judge them ‘extremely tiresome’ (Gaselee 1984: 341), and the cause of ‘such frustration’ (McDermott 1989: 33).

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. 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 . 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. Collective 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. 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. Originally published in 1995. 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. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. 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.

author: Nothing is known about the author. The text is known only from one thirteenth-century manuscript that also contains the only complete text of Chariton’s Chareas and Callirhoe. As with several other ancient novels in Greek, it is often thought to date from about the second century c.e., but without any reliable basis. The plot of the novel conforms to the basic ancient Greek romance (see comments at entry 23). translation: Graham Anderson, in B. P. Reardon, ed., Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). text: Budé (G. Dalmeyda, 1924). bibliography: See entry 23. . . . The local festival of Artemis was in progress, with its procession from the city to the temple nearly a mile away. All the local girls had to march in procession, richly dressed, as well as all the young men of Habrocomes’ age—he was around sixteen, already a member of the Ephebes, and took first place in the procession. There was a great crowd of Ephesians and visitors alike to see the festival, for it was the custom at this festival to find husbands for the girls and wives for the young men. So the procession filed past—first the sacred objects, the torches, the baskets, and the incense; then horses, dogs, hunting equipment... some for war, most for peace. And each of the girls was dressed as if to receive a lover. Anthia led the line of girls; she was the daughter of Megamedes and Euippe, both of Ephesus. Anthia’s beauty was an object of wonder, far surpassing the other girls’. She was fourteen; her beauty was burgeoning, still more enhanced by the adornment of her dress. Her hair was golden—a little of it plaited, but most hanging loose and blowing in the wind. Her eyes were quick; she had the bright glance of a young girl, and yet the austere look of a virgin. She wore a purple tunic down to the knee, fastened with a girdle and falling loose over her arms, with a fawnskin over it, a quiver attached, and arrows for weapons; she carried javelins and was followed by dogs. Often as they saw her in the sacred enclosure the Ephesians would worship her as Artemis. And so on this occasion too the crowd gave a cheer when they saw her, and there was a whole clamor of exclamations from the spectators: some were amazed and said it was the goddess in person; some that it was someone else made by the goddess in her own image. But all prayed and prostrated themselves and congratulated her parents.

This article presents an interpretation of some functions performed by ekphrastic structures in the context of Ancient fictional narrative prose. Concrete examples are taken from two Ancient Greek novels: Daphnis and Chloe by Longus and Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius. Using Olga Freidenberg’s conceptual and interpretative apparatus as a lens for reading the textual material, the central claim of the article is that within Ancient prose narrative, ekphrasis and metaphor are functionally interrelated, with ekphrasis serving to metaphorically embed narrative content within the mythological, affective, and genre-related fields of the textual production of meaning. At the same time, while adopting Freidenberg’s definition of metaphor as a primal state of cognitive indistinction between image and concept, the article attempts to go beyond her mythological interpretation of the Ancient novel and to provide a more socially and historically relevant understanding of the semantic features of this genre.

TheClementine RecognitionsandClementine Homilies, both of which evolved between the second and the fourth centuries after Christ, are treated all too frequently as material for historians, not for critics. A book on the ancient novel is sufficiently erudite if the author shows that he has read them; theHomiliesare omitted in a volume of translations under the title ofCollected Ancient Greek Novels. It might be said that this is as it should be, since theHomiliesare largely what their title advertises, and even theRecognitionscontain much that is extrinsic to the plot. By itself (it might be said) this threadbare plot holds little to engage us, and it is disposed of in a few pages in the works of Hägg and Perry. My object is to show that this neglect is undeserved.

In ancient novel scholarship, the distinction between the ideal Greek novel and its comic–realistic Latin counterpart has been, and still is, highly influential. It originates with R. Heinze’s thesis that Petronius’ Satyricon develops from a literary genre parodying idealistic features in the Greek novels.1 Despite the contributions of scholars warning against applying this dichotomy too rigidly,2 the distinction remains a commonly accepted tool to classify novelistic literature.3 In this paper I will focus on the characterization of the male protagonist in Chariton’s Callirhoe, the oldest of the so-called ideal novels.4 My reading of this character will suggest that Chariton’s position within the ideal genre should be reassessed, and that consequently the overall distinction between ideal and realistic novels is a generalization that does not take into account the actual complexity of one of the oldest representatives of the genre. The distinction between ideal Greek and realistic Latin novelistic literature is largely informed by the divergent depiction of character in both sub-genres. Whereas the Latin novel adopts realistic and sexually explicit character portrayal, scholars have underlined the idealizing aspects in the characterization of protagonists in the Greek novel. Their beauty invests them with a godlike appearance, and their nobility ( ) generates loftiness of character that sharply distinguishes them from other, less noble, characters in the story.5 Scholars have emphasized the unreal atmosphere surrounding this characterization.6 E. Rohde’s view that the protagonists in the Greek novel are ‘seelenlose Gestalten’ and ‘Gliederpuppen’, invested with a ‘leere und 247

El sueño de Nectanebo no es un fragmento de novela griega pero sí un documento interesante para conocer la formación de este género literario, como lo demuestra su relación con la Novela de Alejandro y con otros fragmentos de novela, como el que recoge la historia de Tinufis.