Names and a Gem: Aspects of Allusion in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica

Abstract

Abstract Names can evoke a vast range of associations. Dropped into the calm flow of a narrative they set up ripples which persist long after they have first splashed into the reader’s awareness. Any classicists reading a novel with a character named Donald Russell would expect him to be learned, helpful, and companionable, with a nice sense of humour. A novelist who then constructed a quite different character would challenge readers by a constant play between his construction and their expectation. Inventing (or borrowing) names for characters is one trick open to novelists (and to Athenian comic poets, as Antiphanes reminded his audience) that is largely denied to genres that work with traditional myths. Thus whereas writers (who are most often poets) drawing on a mythological tradition can exploit the ethical qualities which that tradition associates with certain characters (e.g. sit Medea ferox), others with freely invented plots and dramatis personae can create expectations of character and behaviour by telling choice of names; though here too a tradition can establish expectations, as for the servile name Davus in New Comedy. The first part of this discussion explores the way in which Heliodorus, a novelist who draws on a wide range of sophisticated literary tricks, exploits the potential of names to create expectations, partly simply to entertain the reader by offering a character or actions that defeat these expectations, partly to force the reader’s attention on the all-important ethical qualities of his principal characters. The second part of my discussion considers a different rhetorical technique for using subordinate elements of a narrative to throw its main features into greater relief.