Did the ancient Greek novels have characters? The question is not so absurd or paradoxical as it may seem. Aristotle had opined that there could not be a tragedy without action or a plot (that is, a praxis) but that one without character was possible (Poetics 4, 1450a24). His word for character is êthos (in the plural, êthê), which does not mean “character” in the sense of a person in a story (in Greek this is prosôpon, plural prosôpa, as in dramatis personae or cast of characters) but rather the habits and other qualities that constitute a person's moral disposition. Aristotle's notion may seem similar to the idea of character today, but in fact it differs significantly, insofar as the modern notion tends to place the emphasis on traits unique to or distinctive of an individual. Ancient literature, it has been argued, was concerned not with psychologically real individuals but with roles or functions; as Pierre Vidal-Naquet observes of the protagonist in Aeschylus's Seven against Thebes, “Eteocles is not ‘a human being,’ reasonable or otherwise. . . . He is a figure in a Greek tragedy” (277). Still, we might suppose that people even in a fairly primitive narrative, not to speak of Greek tragedy, would meet Aristotle's definition of character, in that they would possess some identifiable moral traits, however limited or superficial: villains are bad, heroes and heroines typically good. Aristotle, however, was thinking of the way character is manifested through deliberate choice (what he called prohairesis, which later became a standard term for “character”), and a tragic or other plot might well proceed without any such active revelation of a person's ethical inclinations.If Aristotle could imagine a tragedy without character, all the more easily might one suppose that character was lacking in the ancient Greek novels, which, since the eighteenth century, have been saddled in English with the condescending label of romance, as opposed to genuine novels that earned their name precisely by virtue of the depth with which they explored human behavior and motivation. Henry James famously insisted on the importance of character in his essay “The Art of Fiction,” first published in 1884 in Longman's Magazine and reprinted in 1888 in James's Partial Portraits:What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character. . . . The novel and the romance, the novel of incident and that of character—these separations appear to me to have been made by critics and readers for their own convenience, and to help them out of some of their difficulties, but to have little reality or interest for the producer, from whose point of view it is, of course, that we are attempting to consider the art of fiction. (392–93)Less often cited is Robert Louis Stevenson's essay “A Gossip on Romance,” to which James was evidently responding; it was published in the same magazine a couple of years before James's article, in 1882, and reprinted in 1887 in Stevenson's Memories and Portraits. Stevenson affirmed:In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous. . . . It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood. Eloquence and thought, character and conversation, were but obstacles to brush aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles. . . . There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not immoral, but simply a-moral . . . ; where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it. (247)Nevertheless, Stevenson notes, “English people of the present day are apt, I know not why, to look somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of tea-spoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write a novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one” (247). The ancient Greek novels were blithely consigned to the category of romance, as though the adventures they recounted were on a par with Treasure Island (though why that, even if true, should count against them, begs an answer).In the twentieth century, Mikhail Bakhtin's influential studies of narrative constituted another impediment to taking seriously the role of character in the ancient Greek novels. Bakhtin affirmed that the Greek romances, as opposed to the modern novel, lacked the dimension of time and that events took place only in space. The protagonists, he observed, wander or are carried off to all parts of the Mediterranean world, but when they are finally reunited, they remain just as they were, unchanged from beginning to end. Their adventures constitute a mere timeless interlude, during which there is no development of character. As Gary Saul Morson, a renowned expert on Bakhtin, puts it:The crucial point to note about the adventures in a Greek romance is that they “leave no trace” (FTC, p. 94). They affect nothing, and, for all the difference they make, might just as well not have happened. . . . Hero and heroine do not change, mature, grow, or even age biologically as a result of their adventures. . . . The entire action of the Greek romance, in other words, takes place in “an extratemporal hiatus between the two moments in biographical time” (FTC, p. 90). It is a time of “pure digression” rather than of “real duration,” that is, the time is opposite to what we find in the nineteenth-century novel, where experience changes people. (Morson 376–77; citing Bakhtin)1Bakhtin evidently conceived of the bildungsroman as the ideal type of the novel, and the ancient Greek tales did not seem to him to fit this paradigm. As if this view, which was widely shared, were not enough to put in question any study of character, much less character development, in the ancient novels, it has also been commonly assumed that Greeks and Romans generally regarded character as stable. Education could, no doubt, modify innate or inherited temperament, but by and large the traits that would mark the adult were, it was believed, already apparent in the child. As Glenn Most has observed, when the Greeks and Romans “imagined Achilles as a child, they imagined him as being just like the adult Achilles, only rather smaller” (449). Most writes: “Even in political biography, like Plutarch's . . . , there is, despite the importance given to education in forming character, surprisingly little attention paid, if any, to the great man's childhood. . . . Alcibiades . . . displayed already on the playground the very same mixture of charm and vice that made him notorious as an adult [Plutarch Life 2.1–2]” (451). Continuity of character does not altogether rule out change, but where change occurs, it was typically ascribed to education rather than to life experience. Tim Duff asks in an important study of Plutarch's view of character: “[H]ow did Plutarch see education as actually working? What is its relationship to adult character?” (1). He observes that Plutarch's Life of Themistocles “contains within it a tension between two models for understanding the relationship of education to adult character. The first approach sees character as in the process of being formed in childhood, and education as affecting the way in which character develops; the second approach sees character as constant and unchanging, and as revealed in childhood behaviour and in attitude to education” (ibid.). But it remains the case that “the static/illustrative model of character is . . . the norm” in Plutarch's Lives, and the developmental model occurs “in contexts where philosophical modes of thinking are dominant,” above all where there is reference or clear allusion to Plato (21–22).I have begun with this preamble on modern views of ancient conceptions of character to convey some idea of the originality and even daring of the book under review. De Temmerman believes that character is very carefully delineated in the Greek novels and that it also exhibits development of a kind at least comparable with the modern genre. Thus he affirms that the character of Chariclea, the heroine of Heliodorus's novel, Aethiopica, is not “merely static” but undergoes “a mental change involving self-knowledge, self-esteem, and external influence.” Not that every previous critic has denied such transformations: De Temmerman is meticulous in giving credit to predecessors, to a degree that is still common or at least familiar in classical philology but is rarer, I think, in modern criticism. To take but one example, Tim Whitmarsh has argued that “the second-century romances” as a whole “are transformative.” Thus, Callisthenes, a secondary character in Achilles Tatius's novel, Clitopho and Leucippe, “starts out as a rogue rapist, but ends up changing his personality entirely: ‘everyone marvelled at his sudden transformation from a worse character to an entirely excellent one.’” Lampis, again a relatively minor figure in Longus's novel, Daphnis and Chloe, “is ‘forgiven’ for his actions, implying contrition,” and “at a subtler level still,” both Achilles Tatius and Longus “fill their romances with embedded narratives of mythical metamorphosis, which reinforce . . . the thematic centrality of the transformation theme” (106). Whitmarsh argues further that “not only are the characters metamorphosed by their experiences, but also we as readers are promised our own far-reaching transformative event” (129). Such interpretations clearly challenge the idea that the ancient novels represent a timeless universe of “pure digression.”Before I examine De Temmerman's arguments in greater detail, it may be helpful if I provide a brief outline of the nature of the novels in question. Five long prose fictions survive complete from Greek antiquity, along with fragments of several other works that plausibly conform to the genre we think of as the novel. They date to somewhere between the first and third centuries A.D., and all five describe the fortunes of a young man and woman on the cusp of adulthood, who fall mutually in love, are separated against their will, endure various torments in the course of their adventures, and are finally reunited and come safely home (there are some significant departures from this schematic skeleton, but they need not concern us here). Of the five novels in question, two, which are very likely the earliest, came to light only in the eighteenth century: Chariton's Callirhoe and the Ephesiaca or Ephesian Tale by Xenophon of Ephesus. The other three—Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, Achilles Tatius's Clitopho and Leucippe, and Heliodorus's Aethiopica or Ethiopian Tale—were known to Byzantine and subsequently to Renaissance scholars and had a significant influence on the emergence of the modern novel.One of the striking features of the novels is that the protagonists, who are always a male and a female, although subordinate characters may have pederastic relationships, fall in love mutually. This is a departure from the asymmetrical paradigm of lover and beloved, in which adult males are the subjects of erotic passion and women and boys the objects. The love between the hero and heroine is put to the test in the course of their wanderings and misfortunes, and their fidelity, which can only be manifested over time, confirms erôs, which was traditionally seen as intense but fickle, as the basis for marriage. In this respect, time in the novels does matter, and the characters may even be seen as growing in commitment and fortitude as a result of their travails (see Konstan). Sophie Lalanne, however, has argued that the reciprocal enamorment and symmetrical narrative roles of the novelistic hero and heroine are a sign rather of their youth and that what they learn by the end of the novels is to assume the adult, dimorphic identities of man and woman.De Temmerman is the first scholar to write a full-scale study devoted entirely to the question of character in the Greek novels, and he “sets out to test three independent questions”: Are the protagonists of the novels mere types, or do they “show signs of individuation”? Are they idealized, or do they “show traces of lifelikeness”? “[D]o they remain static throughout the narrative or is their character shown to change?” (7). As he observes, most scholarship has hitherto plumped for the first option in each case. De Temmerman is well aware of the theoretical issues involved in discussions of character and the danger of applying modern conceptions to ancient texts; he thus bases his approach rather on classical rhetoric, which includes both handbooks, such as Aristotle's Rhetoric, and collections of school exercises in narrative and description that go under the name of progymnasmata or “preliminary exercises,” complemented by the modern vocabulary of narratology. The technical term for the representation of êthos was ethopoiia, and it had its own rules and forms. When it comes to character development, moreover, De Temmerman notes: “The process of becoming an adult . . . is firmly associated with the development of rationality” (23), and rationality in turn implies both self-control and a capacity to control the behavior of others.De Temmerman treats the five Greek novels in turn, beginning with Callirhoe. The novel is unusual in Chariton's focus on the heroine, whose name figures as the apparent title of the work. While both Callirhoe and her husband, Chaereas, are described as exceptionally good-looking, her beauty is compared to that of Aphrodite herself; what is more, when she finds herself pregnant and is under the false impression that Chaereas is dead, she consents to marry another man so as to preserve the baby's life (she persuades herself that Chaereas would have desired this). De Temmerman argues that “the compromising of Callirhoe's sôphrosynê,” that is, her modesty or chastity, renders her characterization ambiguous (51). In particular, she seems to be modeled on both the faithful Penelope and the faithless Helen. De Temmerman in fact suggests that the contrast between these two ideal types is not as sharp as one might suppose: “Penelope's chastity as well as her attitude toward her suitors is more than once invested with indeterminacy and ambivalence” (56), and there was also a positive version of Helen's character (it was only a figment of her that went to Troy). Other patterns of allusion further complicate the representation of the protagonists, as do the rhetorical strategies that Callirhoe employs, which increasingly reveal her to be capable of “dissimulating emotional expression and exerting control over other persons” (73). Chaereas too exhibits growth or development over the course of the novel. For example, he acquires more confidence as a public speaker, illustrated by the increasing number of speeches he delivers (86), and he evinces a growing command of rhetoric; he also evolves from a fairly callow boy who several times contemplates committing suicide into a military leader capable of defeating the king of Persia in a sea battle. These changes in Chaereas too are cued by references to epic literature: “he is simultaneously assimilated to a number of Homeric heroes,” but with changing and often contrary implications as the narrative progresses (92): thus, “the depiction of Chaereas as a manipulatory general (and of Callirhoe as his adviser) draws on different traditions that invest his (and her) character with a certain amount of moral ambiguity” (99). In the background lie Themistocles, that great but duplicitous Athenian general, and Alcibiades, equally notorious and perfidious. What triggers the transformation in Chaereas, moreover, is precisely love. All this, De Temmerman concludes, lends the novel a kind of naturalism that belies the tendency to regard its representation of character as merely idealizing.The above is the barest summary of De Temmerman's treatment of Chariton, which extends over seventy dense pages. To some extent, the detail smacks of the doctoral thesis that gave birth to the book, but it also reveals something of the character of classical literary scholarship, which is especially suited, perhaps, to the values of the texts with which it engages. De Temmerman does not listen for “the clink of tea-spoons and the accents of the curate,” nor does he observe the way the heroine of Chariton's novel might “stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way.” This is not to say that his ear and eye were not attuned and focused: the accents he heard are the echoes of a long literary tradition, and the postures he noticed are those that indicate moral dispositions, things like blushes (he discusses Callirhoe's blushes at length) and marks of deference or pride. The protagonists acquire mastery via their control of language: they become skillful rhetoricians, the kind who, should they ever read a novel like this, would recognize and appreciate the multiple layers of allusion that help define their own characters.De Temmerman next tackles Xenophon of Ephesus, whose novel is commonly regarded as the simplest and least sophisticated of the five. As De Temmerman points out, simplicity, or what the Greek rhetoricians call apheleia, is itself a rhetorical technique. I am reminded of Paolo Valesio's brilliant demonstration of the way in which Cordelia, in Shakespeare's King Lear, exploits the rhetoric of sincerity with all the sophistication of her apparently more disingenuous and articulate sisters. What is more, “simple discourse invites the reader to interpret” (131), the more so since characterization is indirect rather than explicit: this may be part of the reason why critics have missed the significance of character in the Ephesiaca. But that significance is there, and De Temmerman finds moral ambiguity in the characterization of the protagonists in Xenophon's novel as well as in Chariton's.Achilles Tatius was the most ironic of the Greek novelists, self-consciously sending up some of the genre's conventions or at least carrying them to an extreme that smacks of parody (given the small number of novels that survive, it is hard to speak with confidence about generic features). What is more, it is the only one of the five to be narrated retrospectively by the protagonist, which summons the reader to discriminate between author and narrator, though I am not convinced that Clitopho's Phoenician origins are enough to characterize him as a “barbarian” (155). Although it is true, as De Temmerman observes, that Clitopho is unaccompanied by his beloved Leucippe at the beginning of the novel, as he sets out to tell his story to a perfect stranger, I am not sure we are meant to suspect that “she never existed in the first place” (157). But even the suggestion of such narratological legerdemain points to the potential complexity of characterization in this novel. De Temmerman notes, for example, that the only person to describe Clitopho as sôphrôn or “temperate” is Clitopho himself (162): what are we to make of this datum? Clitopho's words and actions seem to “suggest that he is interested exclusively in sex” (166), which would make him quite exceptional in a genre that is given to exalting erôs, a form of desire that certainly sees its fulfilment in sex but is by no means reducible to what in Greek was called aphrodisia. De Temmerman pays close attention to verbal echoes in the text: if Clitopho uses expressions similar to those of an acknowledged villain, it casts further doubt on his self-presentation (168). The same holds for the narrator's interpretation of myths and paintings: there is room for readers to draw their own conclusions on the basis of Clitopho's descriptions or ekphrases, interpretations that may not concur with his. Again, allusions to heroes such as Hercules or Achilles (“two renowned mythological seducers of women,” 175) may compromise the image that Clitopho projects of himself, as does Clitopho's sententiousness and proclivity to learned digressions. As for Leucippe, Clitopho's characterization of her seems to be modeled on Chariton's Callirhoe, which raises the question of the literariness of his account and the possibility that he may be “fictionalizing” (194)—even his descriptions of her body language are plausibly motivated by what he desires to see, which is precisely a responsiveness to his own desire.Longus's Daphnis and Chloe is cast in a pastoral setting and traces their love from the first blossoming of erotic passion, when the protagonists have reached the age of pubescence, to their final marriage, when they leave behind the “childish games” of their youth—the mutual kissing, hugging, and lying naked together that may plausibly, I think, be labeled as “polymorphically perverse”—and achieve full, that is, phallic union, with Daphnis taking the lead and instructing his bride in sex. When they first experience the longings associated with erôs, in their early teens, they are still unaware of its nature, and one of Longus's delightful ploys is to focalize their activities through their eyes, which grants the reader a knowing superiority—the essence of the pastoral gaze. Over the course of the novel, De Temmerman observes, “Daphnis' increasing physical maturity is accompanied by an increase in emotional control over Chloe” (220), as illustrated by a number of narratological devices, such as metaphors, inset stories that parallel the primary narrative, references to myth, and just plain events, principal among which is Daphnis's initiation into sex by an older, married woman, combined with his discovery of his true parents (both he and Chloe are foundlings), which gives him a social advantage as well (she too will turn out to be well-born). Like the protagonists of the other novels, Daphnis acquires rhetorical skills as the story progresses, the kind of mastery to which ancient readers were especially well attuned, and this too is a source of control and power: “Like Chariton, Longus firmly identifies rhetorical and social skilfulness as crucial components of a development towards adulthood” (245). In all, the hero and heroine are “representatives of their respective categories [that is, male and female] rather than individuals” (244), which is always one pole of novelistic characterization.Heliodorus's Aethiopica is the longest and most complex of the Greek novels and likely the latest. It begins with a mysterious scene of the aftermath of a slaughter on the beach, and it is not until halfway through the novel that the entire background story is filled in, creating a unique texture of suspense (the second half proceeds in a temporal straight line). Characterization is comparably sophisticated, and the conflict between natural disposition and learned values is on display. The reader, moreover, loses the secure moral perspective implied in Longus's novel (and, I would add, in nineteenth-century British novels as well) and may only come gradually to realize that the characters were more savvy than they had seemed. Language is again a major interest of De Temmerman, who notes that “rhetorical performance implies the construction of a split between words and intentions” (261) and that, in one passage, the heroine, Chariclea, “explicitly negates her rhetorical powers with a phrase recognized by the reader as highly rhetorical” (262). Heliodorus too is revealed as reveling in ambiguity, but here De Temmerman notices a change: “the thrust of the novel as a whole is to defy any essentialist and fixed conceptualization of identity” (277). Allusions to earlier literature, above all the Odyssey, are double-edged, and the self-perception of characters may not match the way others see them. Even “the happy ending is treated with unparalleled indeterminacy” (293).De Temmerman makes a strong case for a certain degree of “realism” in the characterization of the novels' protagonists, though he notes that “individuation cannot be simply equated with the kind of idiosyncrasy that we are used to in modern literature” (320). I recall reading somewhere that character in literature is precisely what is superfluous to the plot. Rhetoric plays an especially important role in revealing a character's development over the course of the story: a command of language translates into an ability to control others as well as a sign of personal maturity, and in this regard the protagonists in the Greek novels may be said to develop. It is a highly rational manifestation of change—growth is equated with learning—and grounded in moral awareness rather than in modern ideas of repression and self-discovery, but the ancient writers were not averse to exploring and even affirming complexity and indeterminacy in relation both to character and to values.Has De Temmerman shown that character in the ancient Greek novels has something of the salience it does in the modern novel—that it is more like James than like Stevenson, if indeed these two writers are as different as they pretend? I believe that he has, and in addition that he has successfully indicated the way that character, as it was conceived in classical antiquity, had a more pronounced rhetorical quality and, coordinate with that, an emphasis on rationality—the two senses of the Greek word logos—distinct from the style of the typical bildungsroman. Development there is, and time matters, but no hidden traumas are brought to light, and moral doubts take the form of ambiguities and hesitations rather than out-and-out crises (though there is a moment, in Heliodorus's novel, when the heroine suffers a complete moral collapse, and the hero's or heroine's despair marks a turning point in the narratives of other Greek novels as well). De Temmerman's book is addressed in the first instance to classical scholars and presupposes an acquaintance with the texts and some of the conventions of the discipline: there is the occasional abbreviation of a Greek (or German) term that may be opaque to readers outside the guild. It is also very detailed and sometimes a tad plodding, but De Temmerman is, as I have indicated, going against some ingrained preconceptions about these narratives and his brief is a tough one. The value of the book lies not only in demonstrating the importance of character to the ancient novel but also in exhibiting how classical ideas of character and its representation mark that genre off from at least some of its modern heirs. De Temmerman's book will thus be valuable to all who have an interest in the notion of literary character, then or now.