The Representation of Slavery in the Greek Novel: Resistance and Appropriation by William M. Owens

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 421 and obsession with atonement and purification. Offering his life on behalf of his fellow citizens, a quintessentially Roman response to divine anger, Coroebus fits the role of the “providential outsider” much celebrated in Flavian rhetoric. The Callimachean hero also glances at the Flavian “myth” of the young Domitian offering his life and being spared by the gods during the siege of the Capitol in 69 c.e. Coroebus’ “Romanized” narrative of self-sacrifice and redemption is anticipated by the representation of Perseus and Ganymede on Adrastus’ cup: associated by a long tradition with regal attributes such as the ability to keep monstrous enemies under control (Perseus) and apotheosis (Ganymede), both characters can be read, like Coroebus himself, as projections of emperors past and present. In Chapter Six, Rebeggiani interrogates Statius’ response to Roman readings of the Theban war as the product of cultural incompatibility. Rebeggiani defines the place occupied in Roman cultural memory by the Gallic assault of the year 390 b.c.e., and he focuses on the relevance of that event for the crisis of 69 c.e.: the Flavians, as Rebeggiani points out, construed Vitellius’ invasion of Italy as a barbaric assault, and compared his burning of the Capitoline to the destruction of Rome by the Gauls. Moreover, to address Flavian emperors, the panegyrists resumed the narrative of the “providential outsider” who rescues Rome in a time of crisis, and Vespasian even appropriated Greek versions of the Celtomachy. With this background, Rebeggiani reads the Argive assault on Thebes in Thebaid 10 as a projection of foreign attacks on Rome and identifies Menoeceus as a mythical projection of the providential outsider figure. Menoeceus is thus connected to panegyrical presentations of the young Domitian as a saviour in the crisis of the year 69: after all, the Theban prince “is the only character who manages to conquer immortality in a poem that starts with a prophecy of Domitian’s transformation into a god” (258). To conclude, not everyone will feel compelled to believe that Statius conceived of himself as an “adviser of kings”; however, Rebeggiani demonstrates beyond doubt that Statius’ poetry was instrumental in articulating the complex ideology of Domitian’s time, and this book will be an instructive reading for anyone interested in Flavian poetry and in the intellectual history of the early Roman empire. University of Toronto Lorenza Bennardo The Representation of Slavery in the Greek Novel: Resistance and Appropriation . By William M. Owens. London: Routledge. 2020. Pp. ix, 244. The central thesis of the book, from which all its other observations flow, is that the two earliest surviving Greek novelists, Xenophon of Ephesus and Chariton of Aphrodisias , had a different audience (largely slave), point of view (largely pro-slave), and social status (potentially servile background themselves) than the later three, Longus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus. The book is divided into six chapters: while Chapters One and Two deal with Xenophon’s Ephesiaca (“Enslavement and Folktale”) and Chariton’s Callirhoe (“Narratives of Slavery Explicit and Implied, Told and Retold”), Chapter Three (“Two Novels about Slavery”) argues that Xenophon and Chariton’s shared background led to similar approaches to their material. The last three chapters are devoted one each to Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (“Slavery as Nature and Art”), Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (“Slavery and Literary Play”), and Heliodorus’ Aethiopica (“Love and Slavery, Philosophy and the Novel”). A short afterword summarizes the conclusions. 422 PHOENIX The subversion of servile status that Owens detects in the first two novelists (10–17) leads him to contemplate the audience and also the status of Xenophon and Chariton in Chapter Three (88–120). Ancient critique was derisive, dismissing the novel as sufferable for nannies to read over cribs but not suitable to the curriculum (so Macrobius in his commentary on Cicero, Somnium Scipionis 2.7–8). Owens notes that in antiquity those nannies would have normally, or nominally, been slaves, and that the grammatici, tutors to the aristocratic young, at least as evidenced by Suetonius, were more often than not slaves themselves (esp. 219–220). He extrapolates from this a readership that might have comprised a substantial number of slaves or manumitted slaves, to whom these...