Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies) [1 ed.] 9780367472108, 9781032046594, 9781003036647, 0367472104

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations
1 Introduction
2 Theoretical background
3 Chariton’s Callirhoe
4 Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe
5 Heliodorus’ Aithiopika
6 Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon
7 Apuleius’ Metamorphoses
8 A brief concluding postscript
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel

This book explores the areas in which novels such as Chariton’s Callirhoe and Heliodorus’s Aithiopika are ideal beyond the ideal love relationship and considers how concepts of the ideal connect to archetypal and literary patterns as well as refecting contemporary ideological and cultural elements. Readers will gain a better understanding of how necessary an understanding of these ideal elements is to a full understanding of the novels’ possible readings and their readers’ attitudes. This book sets forth critical methods, subsequently followed, which allows for this exploration of ideal themes. Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel will be an invaluable resource for scholars of these novels, as well as ancient narratives and classical literature more generally. Scholars of cultural and utopian studies will also fnd the book useful, as well as some undergraduate students in all these areas. Jean Alvares has been Professor of Classics and Humanities at Montclair State University, USA, since 1996. His notable work includes Classical Myth and the New Millennium, with Patricia Salzman (2017), and the frst full Latin and Greek program at a university in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with Dr. Hui Li, CO 2020.

Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies

Recent titles include the following: Dionysus and Politics Constructing Authority in the Graeco-Roman World Edited by Filip Doroszewski and Dariusz Karłowicz Monsters in Greek Literature Aberrant Bodies in Ancient Greek Cosmogony, Ethnography, and Biology Fiona Mitchell Antonio Gramsci and the Ancient World Edited by Emilio Zucchetti and Anna Maria Cimino Holders of Extraordinary imperium under Augustus and Tiberius A Study into the Beginnings of the Principate Paweł Sawiński Divination and Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity Crystal Addey Travel, Geography, and Empire in Latin Poetry Edited by Micah Young Myers and Erika Zimmermann Damer Ancient History from Below Subaltern Experiences and Actions in Context Edited by Cyril Courrier and Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel Jean Alvares For more information on this series, visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Monographs-in-Classical-Studies/book-series/RMCS

Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel

Jean Alvares

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Jean Alvares The right of Jean Alvares to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Alvares, Jean, author. Title: Ideal themes in the Greek and Roman novel / Jean Alvares. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series: Routledge monographs in classical studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book explores the areas in which novels such as Chariton’s Callirhoe and Heliodorus’s Aithiopika are ideal beyond the ideal love relationship and considers how concepts of the ideal connect to archetypal and literary patterns as well as refecting contemporary ideological and cultural elements. Readers will gain a better understanding of how necessary is an understanding of these ideal elements to a full understanding of the novels’ possible readings and their reader’s attitudes. This book sets forth critical methods, subsequently followed, which allows for this exploration of ideal themes. Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel will be an invaluable resource for scholars of these novels, as well as ancient narratives and classical literature more generally. Scholars of cultural and utopian studies will also fnd the book useful, as well as some undergraduate students in all these areas”— Provided by publisher. Identifers: LCCN 2021017269 (print) | LCCN 2021017270 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367472108 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032046594 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003036647 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Classical fction—History and criticism. | Ideals (Philosophy) in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classifcation: LCC PA3040 .A44 2022 (print) | LCC PA3040 (ebook) | DDC 883/.0109—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017269 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017270 ISBN: 978-0-367-47210-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-04659-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03664-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003036647 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

To Fan Ling, my Leukippe, and Gareth, my Kalasiris, and to the unfgurable Authors of this Amazing Romance.

Contents

Acknowledgments List of abbreviations

ix xi

1

Introduction

1

2

Theoretical background

13

3

Chariton’s Callirhoe

79

4

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe

115

5

Heliodorus’ Aithiopika

162

6

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon

205

7

Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

230

8

A brief concluding postscript

267

Bibliography Index

271 309

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Patricia and Tim who read and critiqued my earlier proposals and drafts, and especially to Andriy Fomin, whose tireless editing, proofreading and nonsense-spotting were of incalculable value. Thanks too to Montclair State University for providing a sabbatical for the fnal phases of this project.

Abbreviations

A. Modern collections Anth. Gr. CIG DK LP ΜΑΜΑ Migne PL PMGF P.Oxy PSI SEG

The Greek Anthology, translated by W. R. Paton, 1916. Corpus inscriptionum Graecarum, 1828–77. H. Diels and W. Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed., 1952. E. Lobel and D. L. Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum fragmenta, 1955. Monumenta Asiae Minoris antiquae, 1928–. Patrologiae cursus, series Latina. Poetarum Melicorum Graecorum fragmenta, 1991. Oxyrhynchus papyri, 1898–. Papiri Greci e Latini, Pubblicazioni della Società italiana per la ricerca dei papiri greci e latini in Egitto, 1912–. Supplementum epigraphicum Graecum, 1923.

B. Ancient authors and works Ach. Tat. Ael. VH Ap. Rhod. Argon. App. B. civ. Apul. Apol. De deo Soc. Flor. Met.

Achilles Tatius [Leukippe and Kleitophon] Aelianus Varia Historia Apollonius Rhodius Argonautica Appian Bella civilia Apuleius Apologia De deo Socratis Florida Metamorphoses

xii

Abbreviations

Arist. De an. Metaph. Poet. Rh. Aristid. In Rom. Ath. August. Conf. De civ. D. Doctr. chr. Charit. Cic. Tusc. Verr. Dio Chrys. Or. Diod. Sic. Diog. Laert. Eur. Alc. Bacch. Hipp. Med. Hdt. Heliod. Hes. Op. Hist. Apoll. reg. Tyr. Hom. Il. Od. Isoc. Paneg. Jer. Adv. Iovinian. Julian. Ep. Or. Longus Luc. De mort. Peregr. Dom. Mart. Perpet.

Aristotle De anima Metaphysica Poetica Rhetorica Aristides In Romam oratio Athenaeus [Deipnosophistae] Augustine Confessions De civitate Dei De doctrina christiana Chariton [Callirhoe] Cicero Tusculanae disputationes In Verrem Dio Chrysostomus Orationes Diodorus Siculus Diogenes Laertius Euripides Alcestis Bacchae Hippolytus Medea Herodotus Heliodorus [Aethiopica] Hesiod Opera et dies [Anonymous] Historia Apollonii regis Tyri Homer Iliad Odyssey Isocrates Panegyricus Jerome Adversus Iovinianum Julianus imperator [Pseudo-Julianus] Epistulae Orationes Longus [Daphnis and Chloe] Lucian De morte Peregrini De domo [Anonymous] Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas

Abbreviations Ov. Am. Ars am. Her. Met. Paus. Petron. Sat. Philostr. Imag. Her. VA Pl. Chrm. Cri. Grg. Phd. Phdr. Phlb. Plt. Prt. Resp. Symp. Plut. Ages. Amat. Comm. not. Conjug. Cons. uxor. De def. or. De exil. De mul. vir. De tranq. anim. Dio Luc. Marc. Nic. Pomp. Prae. ger. reip. Quaest. conv. Polyb. Ps.-Callisth. Ps.-Luc. On. Sen.

Ovid Amores Ars amatoria Heroides Metamorphoses Pausanias Petronius Satyrica Philostratus Imagines Heroicus Vita Apollonii Plato Charmides Crito Gorgias Phaedo Phaedrus Philebus Politicus Protagoras Republic Symposium Plutarch Agesilaus Amatorius De communibus notitiis adversus Stoicos Conjugalia praecepta Consolatio ad uxorem De defectu oraculorum De exilio De mulierum virtutibus De tranquillitate animi Dion Lucullus Marcellus Nicias Pompeius Praecepta gerendae reipublicae Quaestiones convivales Polybius Pseudo-Callisthenes [Alexander Romance] Pseudo-Lucian Onos [Lucius sive Asinus] Seneca

xiii

xiv

Abbreviations

Cons. Mar. Stob. Subl. Suet. Iul. Tac. Agr. Ann. Theoc. Id. Theon Prog. Thuc. Verg. Aen. Ecl. Xen. An. Hell. Xen. Ephes. Zos.

De consolatione ad Marciam Stobaeus [Longinus] De sublimitate Suetonius Divus Iulius Tacitus Agricola Annales Theocritus Idylls Aelius Theon Progymnasmata Thucydides Virgil Aeneid Eclogues Xenophon Anabasis Hellenica Xenophon of Ephesus [Ephesiaka] Zosimus

1

Introduction

The importance of considering ideal themes: an overview When one considers the extant ancient Greek novels (Chariton’s Callirhoe, Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaka, Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon (L & K), Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (D & C) and Heliodorus’ Aithiopika), an obvious feature is their ideal depiction of the love relationship.1 For early critics, this ideal and sentimental dimension undermined the ideal novel’s status as worthwhile literature (Morgan, “Make-believe” 176–77; Bowie, “Who” 150–51); likewise for early modern scholars, such as Beck, Rhode and Perry. The study of the Greco-Roman novel is now respectable, primarily due to a focus on these texts’ “serious” aspects, such as history, politics, sexual attitudes and especially, with the more sophistic novels, the complexity of their literary construction and engagement with identity issues. The novels are often referred to as “ideal” or “idealized,”2 but there has been little systematic study of their ideal elements beyond the couple’s physical beauty, high aristocratic status, fnal triumph over obstacles and happy end. As detailed later, the couple’s ideal relationship shows greater faithfulness, equality and freedom and less violence and compulsion than was common in then-current Greco-Roman society, although heroines are generally subordinated to the patriarchal order. But a novel’s full ideal dimension is found in that totality of ideal images, themes, motifs, narrative patterns and other elements which work together to create an idealizing presentation of the material world, human life, history and destiny. Further, even decidedly non-ideal novels (e.g., L & K and Metamorphoses) evoke many ideal elements, if only to sharpen their sardonic bite as hopeful delusions are crushed. This book’s central concern starts (ontologically, if not chronologically) from the question: “Exactly how are these romantic novels ideal, and why is this important?” From which logically proceeds the follow-up question: “What methods are most suitable for the study of these ideal elements?” Thus, the purpose of this book is: (1) To demonstrate why the study of ideal elements is important; (2) to describe some methodologies to study these elements; and (3) through producing analyses and reading of passages from the novels and of the individual novels as a whole, to prove the usefulness of this approach. DOI: 10.4324/9781003036647-1

2

Introduction I assume three postulates, later clarifed:

1

2

3

The novel’s protagonists’ considerable physical beauty, positive moral qualities and enjoyment of divine favor align with their aristocratic origins and sometimes to an exemplary homeland (Syracuse, Meroe) or place of maturation (e.g., the relatively uncorrupted Lesbian countryside). The protagonists are often displaced versions of a struggling divinity, of the archetypal marvelous child or quest protagonist. For the ideal protagonists to fully enjoy their love, they require a worldly/cosmic order congruent with such human needs, and thus, ideal elements of myth, religion and philosophy appear. Having a superior community is also needed, and thus, elements (events, processes, etc.) of history, ideology and ideal manifestations of the political unconscious are found, allowing readers to imagine “the possibility that reality could be like a Greek novel” (Morgan, “Make-believe” 229). The chief archetypal structures are related to coming-of-age/initiation/ quest myths. The Odyssey also furnishes important paradigms. Refecting Frye’s mythos of comedy, our novels are ideal in showing that the universe has the potential for decent, if fawed, protagonists to overturn baleful laws, shatter obstacles and enjoy true romance and marriage, a metonymy for the creation of a new society.

This deeper understanding of a text’s ideal elements helps us more fully situate the novels in their wider historical–cultural contexts, not only in terms of the era of their initial composition and reception, but also as part of more extensive historical and cultural processes that governed their Nachleben. This study also touches on relationships between society, politics, history and varied cultural productions and reveals cultural and political processes still at work. Accordingly, in concluding sections, I show how each individual novel contains an implied stance toward the believability/plausibility of the ideal. My project is rather experimental in its goals and choice of methods. There are other critical approaches that would have been useful but that have not been utilized. And, because the main topics of each of my subsections are worthy of a book-length treatment, my treatment will necessarily be at times quite schematic. My hope is that this work will be prolegomenon to further studies by other scholars, for whose input I earnestly hope. See more on this in my concluding chapter. Outline of the coming chapters In the next section of this chapter, I provide a background on how the novels were read, on their implied readership, decentering and hybridity and inherent heteroglossia, relationships between truth, history and fction, the past and the sublime and the possibilities of character development. In the

Introduction

3

second chapter, I more thoroughly describe the chief critical approaches I utilize. I focus on myth-symbolic-structural criticism, centered particularly on the work of Northrop Frye, and detail some central archetypal patterns our novels utilize. Fredric Jameson’s work will be central in my analysis of the novels’ ideological dimensions, the varied voices of the political unconscious and the “double vision” of texts and protagonists, while Ernst Bloch’s process philosophy suggests how novel’s ideal elements present a vision of the eternally desired Not Yet. Then, I shall frst briefy discuss the more ideal conception of marriage and family life, principally as offered by Plutarch, and then consider the problematics of desire in its various forms, such as educational and illimitable desire. The central ideal vision posits that desire, although often transgressive, can be somehow be accommodated to social norms and individual wants and need not, as in other genres, lead to tragedy. Lacanian theory will be particularly useful to explicate the confusion about what exactly characters desire, and concerning various words of the father which try to control both desire and identity. In the third through ffth chapters,3 using my critical toolbox, I shall analyze Chariton’s Callirhoe, Longus’ D & C and Heliodorus’ Aithiopika. In the sixth and seventh chapters, I shall demonstrate the importance of ideal themes within works that reject or parody the ideal elements of ideal novels, focusing on Achilles Tatius’ L & K and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. In producing my readings, I will proceed comparatively, for example, reading Callirhoe and the Aithiopika as concerning resistance to empire, D & C and the Aithiopika as stories of marvelous children, and D & C as a story whose protagonists are saved despite their lack of conventional paideia against L & K whose protagonists (may) achieve their happy end despite a corrupting paideia. One ideal dimension appears in how famous (but tragic) myths and narratives are recast with better (and sometimes stranger) endings. For example, Callirhoe will not only recall the abducted and returned Kore, but will be a kind of Helen, yet here the East–West confict brings some beneft to both sides. A short eighth chapter will refect upon the usefulness of my methods, where further work could be done, and why a focus on the ideal aspect of literature would be benefcial for literary study and social progress.

Some general background Authors, readers and hybridity How Greco-Roman novels were read and should be interpreted is endlessly debated. I agree with Schmeling that the novels were unserious (although sophisticated) pleasure reading for sentimentally inclined elite readers, whose high status and literary sophistication is the most reliable point we can make about novel’s “implied” readers (Xenophon 133). Bakhtin notes the novels’ considerable amounts of undigested heteroglossia, the voices of different

4

Introduction

cultures, traditions and perspectives; it seems reasonable that such heterogeneous novels, unsupported by traditions for writing and reading them, combined with their diverse nature, allow for multiple readings hypostatically joined (Morgan, “Make-believe” 222–24). Exacting critics produce very different interpretations, often because of their unprovable perspectives on issues regarding love, society and particularly religion. There is simply no way to prove whether the religious sentiments of Heliodorus or Apuleius, for example, are sincere or not. Philip the Philosopher’s reading of Heliodorus, Leo the Philosopher’s poem on Achilles Tatius’ novel (Anth. Gr. 9.203) and Macrobius’ reading of D & C show the possibility of ideal readings. I will take my positions on these issues and offer my justifcations, and my best hope is to make a case that some (maybe many) readers (but certainly not all) would be sympathetic to my interpretation. My own “implied/ideal reader” is one who, whether seriously or not (probably Apuleius), is attuned or attracted to expressions of the ideal. It is uncertain if any of the novel’s authors (even of the fragments) were from mainland Greece, and only Petronius is assuredly Roman; Chariton, Longus, Achilles Tatius and Xenophon of Ephesus were probably Greek. Authors of the era of the so-called Second Sophistic and later engaged in all manner of reworkings of the Hellenic literary tradition, some quite radical. Our novels all to some extent stand in contrast to canonical center of Greek literature; for example, Callirhoe contrasts more archaic “Dorian” virtue with “Athenian/Ionian” culture, amoral and accommodationist to imperial power; Longus contrasts rustic naturalness with urban distortions; in Charikleia’s odyssey, Greek Delphi furnishes an island of Calypso, and near utopian Meroe the true home where Charikleia must regain her identity, she being also, unlike her Odysseus prototype, an agent of signifcant historical change. The Latin Metamorphoses of the half-Numidian, half-Gaetulian Apuleius, adapted from a Greek original, telling of a Romanized Hellene who ends up abandoning Greece to practice law in Rome while serving Egyptian Isis, his protector in a world uniformly corrupt, presents its own dizzying cultural horse dancings. Whitmarsh (Narrative and Dirty Love) goes further; not only are the novels themselves hybrid in genre, but, in a sense, they are about that hybridity which arises when different cultures confront and cohabit (sometimes willingly, sometimes not) with each other, its interpenetrative, hybridizing politics played out in various cultural recastings. Blurring of line between history, fact and truth: the anagogic sublime Because the ideal is often seen as fantasy, the barrier between fact and fantasy, between truth and falsehood, is an important critical issue. The Greek novel was “drastically undertheorized” with no word existing for the genre (Morgan, “Make-believe” 176; also Reardon, Form 50). There seems a considerable experimentality in the novels’ composition, but we need not assume the author started with no idea of where the narrative was going, although

Introduction 4

5

major changes of direction sometimes occurred during composition. Further, because prose had been traditionally used for history and philosophy, the prose novel often blurs the line between truth and fction. There was a considerable debate as to the fctionality of the Odyssey’s Phaeacian tales, particularly among the Stoics, who saw logos tied to reality, and the role of literature (especially of iconic writers like Homer) as educational.5 Plato himself had blurred these lines by his fctional dialogues, and various authors used the Platonic tradition as authorizing their fction and the value of mythos against logos (Hunter, Plato; Morgan, “Plato” 358–64). While Aristotle declared that poetry, possessing a condensed version of universal truth, was more philosophic than mere history,6 he also counted the mime along with the Socratic dialogue as a type of mimetic prose (Poet. 1447a28– b11; Flinterman 47). Gorgias’ comment on deceiving tragic poets suggests that the falsehoods of fction may be benefcial (Morgan, “Make-believe” 181). D & C’s frame narrator’s makes reference to his work as a ktēma terpnon, possessing that sort of pleasure which Thucydides (1.22.4) rejected as linked to the sort of mythoi-making that historians such as Herodotus promulgated.7 Further, a complex interplay between the natural and art, raising complex questions about forms of representation and mimesis, about mythos versus logos (Zeitlin, “Poetics” 430–44) characterizes the more complex novels. Daphnis and Chloe see Philetas’ speech about Eros as a mythos rather than a logos; similarly, the mythos that is D & C is a fction that tells the truth of human experience in love, one best grasped in the form of an artistically arranged narrative, for art’s artifce can claim to portray the “really real” by disclosing the essential patterns of human experience.8 An iconic mythos, although technically fction, may fgure profound truths, as Theon in his Progymnasmata considered Aesop’s fables to do. As discussed later, the novelists’ use of canonically “sublime” quotes and references also increases the sense that foundational matters are being touched upon. When Kleitophon says his erotic adventures are like mythoi, he means they are unbelievable, like some entertaining mythoi, but also, like Chloe’s mythos, show how love might (mis)function. Properly idealized fction is crafted to show what could be and even could encourage an imaginative absorption in which fction, when experienced in what Ricoeur calls the “imaginary mode,” becomes, in a sense, real.9 Our novels are set in a generally realistic universe and often contain “islands of non-fctionality,”10 such as realistic descriptions of objects, places and events or fctional descriptions based on concrete reality. The laws of the natural universe and the conventions of human psychology are generally obeyed. The temporal settings, of course, are vaguer, and there is often some historical invention. Second Sophistic authors emphasized the ability of the rhetorical art to capture and express physical reality and even help the reader imaginatively enter into the scene described.11 Longinus recognized that the sublime was mostly an effect of the imagination tied by acts of visualization to phantasia12

6

Introduction

or eidōlopoiia (Subl. 15.1; Porter, “Ideals” 83). Longus desires to cultivate in his elite audience that mindset and critical taste able to react to the sublime passage appropriately, an ideologically connected ability which defned the cultural pepaideumenoi. As Lucian notes in De domo, such a person should not, like the average yokel, simply stand mute before a great house’s complex beauty, but be able to admire it, to analyze it and even to produce a superior verbal equivalent—as D & C’s frame narrator does. Longinus stressed the need for a similar rivalry (13.2; Connor 9). The higher ability is to be able to take those fragmentary instantiations of the Good, drawing upon the full resources of Greek tradition, to craft a whole which produces a vision of the Beautiful and Good even more expansive than the original offered. This aligns with Ricoeur’s third level of mimesis, reconfguration, where an understanding of the text encourages action within the world. In complex textual worlds like those created by Longus and Heliodorus, imitations and allusions combine to reinforce the sentimental vision which is strengthened by the readers’ sentimental desire. Because of their smooth, almost inevitable interworking, Longus has also “renaturalized” these conventional elements (Zeitlin, “Gardens” 149–55). Rhetorical and philosophical theories of phantasia and energeia, as represented by Longinus and Philostratus, suggested that the artist’s imagination, combined with intellect, might intuit and represent deeper realities, intuitions validated by the sheer power of the image (literary or visual) to make the reader “see” what it represents. Thus, the didactic power of Longus’ narrator and his sophistic rhetoric arises from its ability to make the reader imaginatively and sympathetically accept the text’s vision of Eros. Yet the novelists often signal that their work is fctional, for example, by highlighting the theatricality or improbability of events being described (Morgan, “Make-believe” 216–18). While designating or constructing some literary passages or ruins as “sublime” is a profoundly ideological operation, in the god-soaked world of later antiquity, numerous stories of miracles and epiphanies, as well as wild nature, offered encounters with the sublime. My conception of the sublime, like Porter’s,13 can be seen in Lacanian terms as interpreted by Žižek,14 the effect of a break or rupture in categories of thought and language, when the experience points to some reality, force, etc., that confounds normal conceptualizations, often giving them a religious-philosophical aura (it is, as Longinus notes, beyond persuasion (1.3-4); also Connor). The sublime experience, as a negotiation with the hallowed past to construct the present (Porter, “Ideals”) is, I suspect, connected to the “numinous,” familiar from comparative religion. Because of its breaking down of usual, limiting categories of thought and experience while being able to be studied and, above all, being able to promote “signifcant progress in greatness and loftiness” (Subl. 1.1; also 15.3 on Euripides’ self-training), the sublime has an ideal vector. Writers like Dio of Prusa (Or. 31.159–60),15 looking at fragmented physical remains or reading the now “classic” texts, have diffculty connecting the

Introduction

7

living Greeks with that past. Pausanias describes a Greek world flled with the shrunken, decayed and fragmented remnants of the Greek past and sees individuals of the Classical past as almost godlike, rather like Homer compares men of his day to the age of heroes (Paus. 8.2.4).16 Many “Greeks” had assumed a hybridized Roman persona or had become too wrapped up in seeking money, power or pleasure to recall the sublime. Porter reads Greek literary criticism and pedagogical17 practice as concentrated particularly on “greatest hits,” passages and even sentences which have an ideological function, items whose value is apparently natural and foundational, but in truth generated by defnite cultural practices. The motifs of nostalgia, decline and loss are a major convention of Greek literature and art, even a kind of fetish,18 being something that presents an image of some desired object or situation, distorted by desire so that real differences are obscured, a process which produces the illusion of a primordial, unifed reality, rather like Lacan’s petite objet a (Cowie 218). Pausanias travels in space, but also across a time that exists in canonical texts, in traditions, monuments and notable locations which evoke that prior, but now lost, wholeness and effectiveness. For Longinus an imaginative immersion in the fragments of great writers of a revered past, like walking among the ruins of Classical Greece, can offer a sublime communion with that past, as perhaps a prologue to a creative rebirth, especially when an attempt is made, in a sense, to “channel” these greats, imagining how Homer or Demosthenes would express an idea, to the point that “we come to believe we have created what we have only heard” (7.2). Longinus and other authors, by projecting ideologically infected cultural memories upon these remnants, make them sublime, combining awe at the majestic past and horror at how only traces of that past still exist to provide elite Greeks with a useful identity in the face of the unspeakable trauma of Hellas’ fall and subordination (Porter, “Ideals” 84). Tellingly, Longinus (Subl. 38.1–3) criticizes Isocrates (Paneg. 8) for revealing rhetoric’s ability to raise and lower our appreciation of items; for the sublime object must be thought as sublime by nature, not due to art, and one of Longinus’ chief purposes is to cultivate in his reader the ability to properly respond to the designated sublime passage and to the cultural memory it is supposed to evoke. The Second Sophistic similarly offers a kind of therapeutic practice largely concerned with reworking and reinterpreting fragmented remains, not wholes, such as choice literary and poetic passages, paintings or still-standing, evocative ruins, granting subjects within the Roman “web of power” through these evocations of a created national memory of the monumental past, a form of cultural capital and identity, which compensates for the loss of political capital (Porter, “Ideals”). Despite the great loss, hopeful possibilities are imagined (Porter, “Ideals” 91) and refected in most of our writers (not Apuleius). Pausanias is “preserving the possibility of freedom itself by performing the imaginative act that in his eyes is constative of freedom to begin with,” reminding a Greece of its past and thus identity, a Greece that, to Vespasian’s thinking, had forgotten

8

Introduction

what freedom meant (Porter, “Ideals” 75). Pausanias restores (or rather creates) memory, investing the Greek past with numinous meaning, and thus prevents decline—and even promotes rebirth. Works associated with the Second Sophistic offer a fabricated vision of the Greek past that perhaps could be made to live again, either through a personal, quasi-spiritual interiorization or perhaps publicly through a type of creative repetition by that respiritualized elite, a type of miracle cure. Consider Pausanias’ tale (10.38.13) about how Phalysius was cured of blindness after looking at a tablet brought by the poetess Anyte at the order of Asclepius at Epidaurus. Porter suggests that Pausanias imagines Greece whole again, like Phalysius’ eyes, and is offering his readers more than the fantasy of an imaginative restoration, but rather form of therapy, a kind of “reorganization in fantasy” of these iconic elements of the Hellenic past, the prelude to any possible restoration. Accordingly, understanding the employment of iconic fragments invested with numinous meaning, the appreciation of which makes one an educated member of the elite, elucidates the ideal in our novels, which partake of the sublimity of the fragments woven into them. As discussed later, Callirhoe, D & C and the Aithiopika create an alternate history made out of reworked fragments, refashioned to make solutions to current political and social problems imaginatively possible; Achilles Tatius and Apuleius evoke, but then undercut, such hopeful idealizations. Character development The terms and paradigms employed to describe and evaluate “character” and “personality” are central to that work’s implicit understanding of the human condition, and thus of human potentials, including enjoying more ideal forms of human life. In the Classical world, as now, there was considerable debate whether character and personality were innate or learned (Jones, Playing 7–9). Important is the foundational assumption, evident in Homer, that the ability to embody the ideal is a quality of aristocrats whose bodies and souls are equally superior. Accordingly, our protagonists are all from the high aristocracy, and of great, if not unearthly, physical beauty. While they are not morally perfect (especially Kleitophon and Leukippe), often they demonstrate a relatively high level of moral behavior. From the reign of Augustus onward, there was an increased stress among the aristocracy on the presentation of the self, an activity linked to matters of status, authority and ftness to rule (Veyne, “Roman Empire”; Foucault, Care). Greco-Roman society was a “society of the spectacle,” with a considerable focus on crafting personae for public display (Whitmarsh, “Greece” 254–57). Some protagonists draw dangerously close to (or even cross over) the line into behavior indicative of the akolastoi, although, eventually, they become respectable and even important members of their communities. Indeed, being comingof-age narratives, the novels should detail steps to the fnal adult form of a protagonist’s character,19 implying character development. Bakhtin thought

Introduction

9

little or no character development occurred during the protagonists’ travels in “adventure time.”20 Modern criticism prefers psychologically complex characters (Selden, “Genre” 45; Temmerman), and, compared with the modern “psychological” novel, our characters seem underdeveloped. This preference for individual psychological complexity should be linked, as Marx noted,21 to the assertion of the autonomous individual, a development tied to the rise of individualistic capitalist society. Even defning what “character” means, then and now, depends on varied cultural, religious, psychological and ideological factors.22 The Greeks tended to evaluate character in moral terms;23 note our characters have to make increasingly sophisticated moral choices (such as Callirhoe’s decision to marry Dionysius) and develop more effective ways of dealing with other people and the demands of society, what has been called the “participant” aspect of character. As Aristotle considered action more important than character in drama, so readers (especially ancient ones) would judge a person based on observable behavior and actions. Omniscient narrators, like Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus, can quote a character’s inner thoughts,24 as when Callirhoe decides (under duress) to marry Dionysius, she deliberately makes herself more attractive, “for once she had decided to get married, she considered her beauty to be her fatherland and lineage” (3.2.16). Yet ancient authors do not provide a rich view into the protagonists’ evolving inner worlds, and thus, while the reader knows the protagonists grow in experience and change their behaviors, it is unclear to what extent their inner selves do. Thus, one can distinguish between “character,” those outward-oriented and socially engaged manifestations, and “personality,” that “inner self” whose workings may not be observable in character. However, the reader can observe exterior events the protagonists experience and how the protagonists then change their behaviors, both personal and social, as they learn more about life and assume more complex roles, such as Chaereas becoming a general and political leader at Syracuse or Lucius successfully practicing law at Rome. As discussed later, we observe how the couple’s “love at frst sight” is tested and transformed to something more enduring. The stress and threats25 of their adventures motivate these changes (Billault, “Characterization” 127–28), and the protagonists themselves declare their experiences meaningful (Montiglio, Wandering 242–46). The possession of paideia is often stressed, and paideia (both good and bad)26 can shape personality and promote character development, including empathy and compassion, such as Callirhoe shows toward the captive Persian queen Statira. Character development can be tied to a growth in rationality and, as Isocrates notes, to the ability to debate and persuade yourself (Temmerman 23; Jones, Playing 24). Descriptions of desire often echo Platonic doctrines in which the ladder of increasingly refned desire leads to a kind of enlightenment, which must be classifed as a form of personality development. Finally, note how Plutarch sees marriage providing an opportunity for philosophical development, a possible “spiritual symbiosis” (Goessler).

10

Introduction

Can we call any of these novels a Bildungsroman, here defned as a story of the struggles of an often-displaced youth while seeking his or her place in the world and an understanding of that world? The discovery of the protagonists’ true nature and the nature of the world occur together, but not easily, since a central struggle is the demands of the self against the demands of society (Graham 1–10). Morgan, as well as Hunter, has argued that our novels cannot be considered Bildungsromane as Dickens’ David Copperfeld was, because such a genre was a creation of more individualist-bourgeois world which promoted notions of individual growth and freedom, whereas the ancient world tended to view individuals as much more communally bound by society and fate.27 Apuleius’ Metamorphoses comes closest, because Lucius’ pursuit of magic corresponds to the youth’s quest to know the world’s nature. Certainly, Lucius’ desires, curiosity, appetites and passion lead to confict with the world. At the end, Lucius, however deluded, believes he has found the truth and his place in the world, and, to some extent, Lucius’ mindset has changed. Of the novels narrated in the third person, the Aithiopika is most like the Bildungsroman as defned, because its two central characters, as I detail later, must leave their home, and struggle to (re)fnd their place in the world. Chaereas and Callirhoe have certainly experienced much, developed various impressive skills and advanced in responsibility and status, but this development is basically a revealing of latent potentials; the same is true for Daphnis and Chloe, although they learn more (starting out even more naïve) and more subtle truths, because Longus has given his protagonists more sensitive natures than Chariton gave to his couple. Identity One can argue that the novels are about the extended pursuit of identity, and a later subsection discusses how Lacan posits that our ultimate (and impossible) desire is for a secure identity. We read narratives through the narratives we have forged (and continue to forge) about our own lives, and, in turn, our lives can be transformed by those narratives.28 Like Telemachus, our protagonists must fnd an identity; like Odysseus, they often lose and must regain an identity, and encounter persons and situations that threaten the loss of identity, and, like the case with Aeneas, sometimes their fnal identity means a permanent loss of their old home. As mentioned, Whitmarsh (especially Narrative and Dirty Love; also Gleason) has detailed the novels’ concern with secure identity in the context of a polymorphic cultural reality, recalling Odysseus’ struggles to retain his Ithacan identity among so many threatening Others. Non-Greeks such as Lucian, Heliodorus or Apuleius, for that matter, had often had an ambiguous take on Greek and Roman identity, and there is a certain drama of identity in orators like Favorinus or characters such as Charikleia and Lucius. Needless to say, sexual identities can be remarkably fuid too. The utopian dimension here is that the protagonists, despite all their trials and displacements, manage to

Introduction

11

attain or regain their proper (or superior) identity, although this is ironized by Achilles Tatius and Apuleius. Part of the ideal development of character lies in learning (or even creating) a new code by which you are defned. This will be particularly true for Daphnis and Chloe and Charikleia and, in a different way, for Lucius.

Notes 1 There were many non-ideal, bizarre and horrifc ancient novels; see Stephens, “Fragments” 669–74. 2 Perry calls these novels “ideal”; Stephens uses the term “ideal-romantic”; Holzberg, as well as Morgan (“Daphnis”), calls them “idealistic”; Morgan writes: “The problem with the Greek novels is they depict the world not as it is, but the world as it ought to be” (“Make-believe” 229). 3 For reasons of space, I could not consider all the extant or major fragmentary novels; considering Xenophon’s Ephesiaka, I would made points similar to those regarding Callirhoe and the Aithiopika. The fragmentary nature of the Satyrica makes overall conclusions uncertain, but there would have been many points in common with the novels of Achilles Tatius and Apuleius. My greatest regret is not being able to treat Apollonius King of Tyre, which, while being something of an outlier, has notable ideal elements in its account of an ideal king, of a family’s destruction and renewal, in chastity-preserved and divine interventions. The Alexander Romance in its various recensions presents a workshop on ideal themes evoking myth, literature and history. And, needless to say, the hagiographic romances, such as Acts of Thecla or the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, have notable ideal elements. 4 On the idea that the novel’s plots were not initially thought out, their components arising from association and contingency, see Nimis, “Sense,” “Memory” and “Prosaics.” 5 Möllendorf 31, citing Kim, Homer 56–71; Romm 172–214. 6 Eden 32 ff.; Paschalis. Note how Aristotle distinguishes between the “basic plot” and “episodes” and even suggests that the dramatist not assign names to the main characters. However, our often-improbable novels are quite nonAristotelian, making them resemble entertaining, real (and possible?) history; see Morgan, “Make-believe” 183–85. 7 For more discussion, see Hunter, Study 47–50; Pandiri 117–19; Trzaskoma. 8 Morgan, “Daphnis” 73–77. Carson details necessary connections between Eros and fction. 9 Mathies 332, citing Ricoeur, “Life” 432. 10 Riess 263, citing Searle 332 and Genette 59 ff. 11 An important theme suggested by Philostratus’ Imagines; see Zeitlin, “Visions” 215. 12 A mind must imagine an action being done before the mind does it. In the higher animals and humans, phantasia is linked to the ability to calculate; see Arist. De an. 3.7 and Rh. 1.11; Carson, 63; also Nussbaum and Rorty. 13 See Porter, “Ideals” and Sublime 1–50. Also Halliwell, Between 343–67. 14 Porter, Sublime 5, citing especially Žižek, Sublime. 15 Porter, “Ideals” 85, who cites Dio Chrys. Or. 31.159–60, where Dio declares it is the ruins of Greece that best attest to its former greatness, not the living inhabitants. 16 Porter, “Ideals” 76, citing Habicht, 162. 17 Porter, “Ideals” 83, who cites Marrou 160–75; Kaster 11–13. This can be connected with the later near fetishizing of the text itself; see Bühler.

12 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

Introduction Porter, “Ideals” 91, citing, regarding the fetish, Bhabha. Laplace, “Achille”; Lalanne 101–28; Whitmarsh, Narrative 100–07. Bakhtin 104–10; also Morgan, “Erotika” 165–66; Fusillo, Romanzo 213–19. Selden, “Genre”; Marx and Engels 13: 615–16. As Temmerman, whose basic conclusions about characterization I follow, has detailed (1–45). Temmerman 11, citing Halliwell, “Traditional Greek Conceptions” 50. Temmerman 25–26, citing Gill, Personality 1–18. For this as one of the important “technologies of the Self,” see Martin, Technologies. For example, Chaereas, due to love, cannot work, as Polycharmus can (Charit. 4.2.3); Dionysius is driven nearly crazy by the appearance of the presumed dead Chaereas (5.9.8). Characters, forced by circumstances, undergo personality shifts, as when the former priest Thyamis is forced into exile, becomes a bandit and starts to behave accordingly, while still showing signs of nobility; see Temmerman 8–11 and 22–23. On paideia in the novel, see Gleason xxi–xxiv; Swain, Hellenism 18–64; Borg; Jones, Playing esp. 20–91. Morgan, “Erotika” 163–90; Hunter, “Response” 191–205; also Selden, “Genre” 45–47. Venema 240, citing Ricoeur, Time 1:74.

2

Theoretical background

Myth-symbolic structuralist criticism: An overview My frst approach, designated myth-symbolic structuralist criticism, supposes that most knowledge exists within our minds as symbols, mental constructions variously composed (sometimes nonverbal), a short-hand simplifcation or interpretation of some knowledge-object, perception or experience; the mind interrelates these symbols in structured ways to create additional meanings; thus, a fundamental pattern can be complicated by elaborating a pattern’s basic units within another pattern, as seen when the archetype of abduction/rape, combined with withdrawal/devastation, is joined to the quest/journey archetype, as in the Demeter and Kore myth (Sowa 236–37). Accordingly, language, archetypal objects, narrative and other structures of symbol are prefabricated elements of thought and largely determine what can be conceived and expressed. Just as forms of houses and tools have been refned over generations, so “archetypal” story patterns, themes, characters and so forth have evolved with the expressive capacity to effectively communicate a culture’s thoughts about the universe and human life. Such items, being already known and, to some extent, expected by the novel’s receptors, important for Ricoeur’s “prefguration” of a text,1 carry a weight of signifcance quasi-independently of the text’s employment of them. Archetypes and rituals, which permeated the lives of the novel’s readers, arose from the same experiences of life, and they subsequently infuence how humans experience life (Dowden, “Fluctuating Meanings”). Our texts show considerable awareness of the mythical echoes they contain, echoes implicitly directing the reader toward the greater signifcance of characters and events. Scholars of myth and folktale write of “story types” such as the quest, which have been extensively cataloged.2 Some simple archetypes (e.g., the omnipotent god) are end products of a process with considerable ideological and social dimensions. Archetypal elements often undergo “displacement,” as when, for example, a myth of a god becomes the story of a more ideal human. However, the true value of a textual element is ultimately dependent on its cultural context. Thus, critics see historical, social and especially ideological meaning DOI: 10.4324/9781003036647-2

14 Theoretical background in the deformation of earlier mythic patterns (Jameson, Political Unconscious 118–19); for example, earlier forms of medieval romance (the chanson de geste), were “kidnapped,” enabling the later medieval aristocracy to imagine the world of the chivalric romance mirrored (and thus ennobled) their own courts and lives (Frye, Secular Scripture 175–82). Likewise, the extent romances of Chariton and Heliodorus and others such as the Ninus Romance, the Metiochus and Parthenope Romance can be seen as “historical novels,” wherein mythic elements were refashioned to have relevance for the elite of the Roman empire (Hägg, “Callirhoe”). Gerald Manley Hopkins opposed a poem’s “overthought,” that is, its “explicit meaning,” to its “underthought”3 that resides in the “texture of images and metaphors” that produce signifcant meaning (Frye, Critical Path 68). We consider whether a work’s historically and culturally mediated “overthought” (e.g., a Greco-Roman setting) harmonizes or contrasts with the underlying archetypal patterns; thus, the sophistic artistry Longus uses in Daphnis and Chloe (D & C) works in harmony with and thus develops the potentials of its mythic patterns to create a grander vision of life, love and the universe. The mash-up of Leukippe and Kleitophon (L & K) is purposefully more jarring, undercutting such utopian visions. Attention to these patterns is especially important when we consider how the text was received by non-ideal readers,4 whose readings would be guided by patterns learned through previous engagements with varied cultural productions. And certainly, as Ernst Bloch stressed (discussed later), a frequent set of patterns involves possibility of a better, even utopian, world. The recovery of myth Frye, along with Frazier, Spengler, Cassirer, Ricoeur, Bloch and even Lacan and Freud, sought to reassert myth’s utility. This process goes back to the allegorization of Greek myth by Plato and the Stoics, followed by Philo’s rereading of Hebrew myth and Origen’s recasting of “Christian” myth. Modern theorists posit that myths provide insights into what we might become, perhaps through Frye’s “creative repetition” or Riceour’s third stage of mimesis, reconfguration, where the reader’s recovery of myth can lead to action in the world. Frye’s fully imaginative reader interacts with all that he or she has ever read, with the goal of integrating all of it (Russell, Northrop 135–36; Frye, Anatomy 122). Frye, inspired by Cassirer, claims that, when we study the varied productions of the humanities, we study something liberated from lived experience (Frye, Anatomy 93); likewise, Henry James saw romance as “experience liberated . . ., disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it.”5 Correspondingly, the archetypal narrative patterns of romance give artistic works a sense of containing allegories involving larger matters (Frye, Anatomy 196). For a reader attuned to Frye’s mythoi, their plots and symbols, literature and life offer a revelatory landscape, including

Theoretical background 15 utopian possibilities. For Christian writers, it is from the telos of apocalypse and paradise that all human life and history must be understood, a similar interpretative dimension being observed in D & C’s prologue, where all events are read under the love’s triumphant sign. At the psychological level, the career of the novel’s protagonists can fgure positive potentials in the readers’ own lives, such as keeping basic purity, fnding some abiding love object, and, as Bloch would insist, expressing their unerasable dreams of a better society. Overview of Frye and his method The best known proponent of myth-symbolic and archetypal criticism6 is Northrop Frye, who explored mythic patterns to better understand the mythopoetic imagination of William Blake. Infuenced by the expansive thought-systems of Spengler, Cassirer, Frazier and Jung, he came to view all literature as one massive imaginative structure with its own immanent meaning.7 For Frye (as for the Romantics), the imagination, a structuring mechanism, is our central creative facility.8 Our archetypes, taken together, reveal how desire—for Frye, the motivating force of all human action9 — obtains the objects and conditions for desire’s fulfllment and thus creates civilization. These archetypes also provide a vision of the forms of desire, obstacles to the fulfllment of desire, as well as of the goals of human labor (Frye, Anatomy 105–06; Jameson, Political Unconscious 71–72). And since the constructive principles of storytelling are the same in mythical and naturalistic stories (Frye, Anatomy 51–52), these same patterns of narrative and image occur in more “realistic” modes of fction. Thus, for Frye, myth (as an assemblage of archetypal patterns) is the central structural principle of literature, a constitutive element that allowed all works of literature to be analyzed as part of his “total order of words” (Vickery 224; Frye, Stubborn Structure 18). I agree with these postulates. All creative works also possess an ethos, a social meaning10 that exists in the artwork’s depiction of social world(s) as well as in the social relationships that bind the author/artist and the work’s receptors. And since these receptors may be widely separated from the author in culture, space and time, art provides a communion from past to present (Frye, Anatomy 24–25). Frye’s social meaning is linked to art’s overriding purpose to imaginatively create a more human and less alienating cosmos. For Frye, literature expresses the “language of concern,” and those imaginative artistic productions that use or create myth (especially romance) process humanity’s central concerns more fully than simply scientifc, realistic or naturalist productions can. Frye (Critical Path) later recognized the need for a proper balance between “myths of concern” which, as they stress societies’ interests, tend to favor a rigid circumscribing of human thought and behavior, and more anarchic “myths of freedom” that emphasize the human ability to be freed from prior constraints and to make things new again.

16

Theoretical background

Frye’s vision of romance Frye saw romance effecting a distinctive, and useful, transformation of the past, involving “creative repetition,” wherein the presentation of a past culture or situation highlights unrealized potentials in the reader’s own society. This aligns with Porter’s view of how Pausanias viewed the iconic fragments of the glory days of Greece as a form of communion with prior greatness that could inspire the present. When critics such as Lentricchia see Frye’s vision as “. . . generated by a thoroughly despairing and alienated understanding of the possibilities of historical life,” they misread. Lentricchia continues: “For Frye actual history can be nothing but a theater of dehumanization, a place of bondage and torture” (26). I argue instead that for Frye, literature can be about the possibilities (some ideal) of human life, and understanding these potentials helps humans positively shape their history. Although many aspects of Frye’s myth-critical methods and conclusions seem fawed,11 his survey of the prevalent characters, narrative patterns, symbols of literature and their signifcances remains invaluable.12 Here I particularly stress Frye’s analysis of romance and comedy as it applies to the ideal qualities of our Greco-Roman novels. Medieval “romance” had its roots in aristocratic epic, ballads and more “popular” vernacular literature.13 The modern novel, associated in English literature with Richardson, Fielding and Defoe, was often defned against the “romance,” whose characters are often said to be types rather than complete individuals, their locales, histories and actions less limited by the conventions of realism, and their emotions and actions less restrained and logical, while more “realistic” novels, such as Balzac’s, provided more detailed, realistic descriptions. The appearance of the mass-marketed romance, and magazines such as True Romance added further terminological confusion. Thus, I denote the works I consider “novels”; when I use the term “romance,” I generally mean a work similar to those texts traditionally identifed as romances, especially various medieval and early modern productions. The mythoi Frye, adapting Spengler, identifed four pre-generic meta-narratives, four “master plots” informing all literature. These masterplots in turn are represented by his four meta-genres, which Frye called mythoi—comedy, romance, tragedy and irony/satire (Frye, Anatomy 158–239; Denham, Northrop Frye and Critical Method 66–76). Frye’s mythoi of comedy and romance are ideal in spirit, both possessing a protagonist who triumphs over opposition and creates a better condition and even elements of a new society. Our novels align with Frye’s mythos of comedy, particularly D & C and L & K. Critics have often noted the connections between comedy and the novel.14 Frye fnds the essence of the mythos of comedy in Greek New Comedy, wherein

Theoretical background 17 boy falls in love with girl, overcomes blocking characters or situations and is fnally able to marry the girl. The confict is more delusion and absurdity versus reality and sanity, and the triumph comes in the anagnōrisis of the true situation, for example, the discovery of the true parents of Daphnis and Chloe. Delusion is manifested by characters who do not know their origins or are mistaken about past events (e.g., Hydaspes) or in other foolish or obsessive behavior (e.g., Apuleius’ Lucius). Villains can be redeemed; thus, Xenophon’s bandit Hippothous and Heliodorus’ Thyamis are brought back into society and to their proper status, and even the would-be rapist Lampis plays at Chloe’s wedding Longus 4.38. There is an emphasis on freedom from illusion and the breaking of falsehood and improper rules (often associated with patriarchal power), with wrongs righted. Similarly, our ideal novels describe various failed attempts at arranged marriages, unjust trials and even the abolition of human sacrifce. The comic hero is more lucky and good-natured than heroic, and he succeeds almost despite himself, often due to divine favor. More ideal is the implicit creation of a new society as observed in the weddings that conclude three of our novels, along with the promise presented by their children as well as the new political and social status achieved by the protagonists and their allies.15 In contrast, romance narrative focuses more upon the hero’s quest and his forceful triumph over evil and, for Frye, his freedom of action. Those ideal novels that lean more toward heroic romance and near-tragedy have manifestly evil antagonists such as Xenophon of Ephesus’ Manto, Heliodorus’ Arsake or King Antiochus of Apollonius King of Tyre. High romance’s heroes tend to be more independent, like the medieval knight-errant, free to act with a minimum of restraint, and the benefts tend to be located more in the hero’s new status, although a new society frequently emerges, as seen in Aeneas’ establishment of the Trojans in Italy or Arthur’s Camelot. While, for Frye, the comic vision ends with an image of a unifed and festive society (as seen in the Judeo-Christian storyline), glimpsed during the wedding of Daphnis and Chloe, the romance vision resembles a fraternity of individuals and equals, such a gather at Arthur’s Round Table (Frye, Secular Scripture 172–73). But what Frye considers romance’s “core,” with its triumphant “solar” hero and ethically polarized protagonists and antagonists and depictions of good and evil, are in part the ideologically charged tools by which a dominant class obscures the true nature of the actions of those individuals who threaten the ruling system.16 In less centralized societies, the hero is more likely to be the trickster who wins through luck and wiles, not by force, than the heroic warrior (Jameson, Political Unconscious 110–19). Frye acknowledges the prevalence of the trickster-hero in romance, whose success is based on luck and destiny as much as on his own valor.17 Popular folktales often depict the embarrassment or ruin of the absurd and powerful (e.g., The Aesop Romance), or mock oppressive social conventions. Some romances (e.g., courtly romances), often espouse values opposed to the martial, hierarchical or religious values offcially in force. Note how in all our

18

Theoretical background

novels either the hero, the heroine or both engage in transgressive behavior, sometimes with apparent divine connivance. For example, Charikleia, like her quasi-father Kalasiris, combines very lofty moral standards with Odysseus-like trickery. Our novels show how the realities and demands of love often cannot conform to many moral prescriptions and often take surprising forms. Romance’s basic plot segments can contain elements of all four mythoi.18 The passivity, inexperience and occasional foolishness of the hero of our Greek ideal novels combined with his ultimate good luck (the earlier Chaereas, Kleitophon and Daphnis) link him with the protagonists of New Comedy. Yet in the novelists’ era, new models for heroism appeared, which would become important models for heroic behavior in early Christian literature;19 in later courtly romances, heroism likewise is altered (e.g., Marie de Frances’ Lanval). While the traditional tragic hero (e.g., Achilles) gained his heroic authority through strength and violence, his death proves his vulnerability and thus ultimate weakness. Thus, as a more “romantic” attitude arises, the hero tends to triumph in what he can control,20 that is himself, and his triumph comes oftentimes in suffering and endurance. Only Chariton’s Chaereas resembles those violent, aggressive heroes of marital epic. While Theagenes is capable of heroic derring-do (wrestling a bull and a near-giant) in his virtual enjoyment of his sufferings (e.g., Heliod. 8.6.4), he acts more like a hero in a Christian martyrology. Xenophon’s Habrocomes is heroic mainly in the persistence of his wanderings and endurance of his trials, as is his Anthia. Achilles Tatius’ protagonists endure horrifc adventures and in his endurance and defense of his love, even Kleitophon is quasi-heroic. Each archetypal mythos has six phases, different narratives employing themes pertaining to different segments of the core mythos plot. As noted, romance’s core plot lies in the traditional quest narrative.21 The frst-phase narrative of the romance’s mythos often feshes out the details of the protagonist’s origins; being a hero, all the archetypal patterns of the marvelous child (e.g., Daphnis, Chloe and Charikleia) can be employed here. In the sixth phase, frequently concerning the hero’s end, themes of isolation or disintegration dominate. Thus, the phases of these mythoi range from presenting the new society or hero as something incipient and tentative, to a condition that has become an established part of the world order, to a state in decay or with the actions being viewed from a more contemplative viewpoint; the particular phase of a mythos an author employs often refects the work’s ideological import.22 The Greek novels resemble “romances” due to adventures common to Frye’s third-phase romance; thus, our protagonists go on journeys and have adventures that largely conform to quest-pattern adventures that bring them mature status and impact their communities (Reardon, Form 16). However displaced the romance pattern is, it remains a type of epic, demonstrating “man’s vision of his own life as a quest” (Frye, Secular Scripture 15). Our ideal Greek novels can lean (and maybe cross over) toward sentimental or

Theoretical background 19 ironic comedy (especially the novels of Achilles Tatius and Longus) or toward heroic romance and near-tragedy (the novels of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Heliodorus and especially the Apollonius King of Tyre). The Greco-Roman novel being Epic for Everyman (Perry, Ancient Romances 48), its human-focused epic recalls myths of gods forced to struggle with mortal life (e.g., Gilgamesh, Heracles and Achilles) and contains the archetypal pattern of the god who lives among humans, then suffers, dies and sometimes rises to rejoin the divine company, often producing apocalyptic renewal. And as noted, because the novel is also “for Everyman,” it brings from comedy a decent, if fawed, protagonist who succeeds because he is lucky and has divine support. When an extensive body of cultural productions involving a single myth or legend (e.g., the poems, plays and mimes concerning Heracles or Odysseus) is surveyed, all phases can appear, creating a virtual history of the hero’s life that stretches from his birth to his more contemplative (sometimes decaying or eccentric) old age.23 Genres as they age can become more expansive, inclusive, and tend toward anatomy. For example, note the immense medieval expansion and embellishment of the Arthurian or Charlemagne cycles and works of such a decentered formlessness as to resemble the complex interwoven designs of medieval manuscript illumination. This narrative style of manifests what Eugène Vinaver has called “interlacement” (Vinaver 68–98; Beer 20–21), an interweaving of themes (see Ovid’s Metamorphoses) combined with much additional embellishment through digressions.24 The fact that overall plots have no obvious beginning or end accords with a perspective that sees every adventure as part of a chain of events that stretches endlessly backward and forward in time—a viewpoint arguably more true to human experience than a plot with a clear beginning, middle and end.25 Longus, Achilles Tatius and especially Heliodorus as well as the various contributors to the Alexander Romance flled their works with all manner of sophistic and encyclopedic learning and digressions. The third phase’s decisive triumph of good over evil appears, for example, in the crucifxion of Chariton’s Theron and the defeat of the Heliodorus’ Persians. But, more importantly, the adventures stress the preservation of innocence and personal integrity, fgures for identity, as emblematized by the valuation of virginity and faithfulness to the beloved. Frye notes: Deep within the stock convention of virgin-baiting is a vision of human integrity imprisoned in a world it is in but not of, often forced by weakness into all kinds of ruses and stratagems, yet always managing to avoid the one fate which really is worse than death, the annihilation of one’s identity. (Secular Scripture 86) And, as in Frye’s fourth and ffth phases of romance, the novels’ protagonists are also defenders of a previously established ideal world. As detailed

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later, Chariton’s Syracuse, Heliodorus’ Meroe and the pastoral countryside of Lesbos are presented as quasi-ideal locales whose excellence is often linked to deeper dimensions of the divine or ethnic history, a feature implied even in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Sets of symbols and images can construct a virtual chain of being, a model of the cosmos whose meanings align with narrative patterns. In their most archetypal forms, these elements tend toward the expression of totally fulflled desire (Frye’s apocalyptic vision) or desire completely frustrated (Frye’s demonic vision). For example, in apocalyptic imagery the anthropomorphic god instantiates the ideal human life, one free from all the constraints of death, illness, ugliness, want and even morality. Demonic elements, in turn, make visible our worse fears through images of imprisonment, confusion, false accusation, torture and perverted forms of everyday goods, such as cannibalism, items familiar in the “lower world” into which the protagonists are carried and suffer.26 The nadir of a protagonists’ career (such as when Charikleia falsely confesses to Kybele’s murder and willingly goes to the pyre) presents Frye’s “demonic epiphany” (Anatomy 139 ff.). Coming-of-age narratives/quests Our novels are coming-of-age narratives, often containing, in real or displaced form, the quest/hero’s journey, which can refect initiations.27 The Odyssey’s wanderings and struggles furnish paradigmatic models, especially since Odysseus must regain his status and identity and come to a greater understanding of life, while Telemachus fghts to establish his personal heroic identity (Dimock). Mythic themes are likewise important,28 especially those of the marvelous child; I employ this synthetic fourfold pattern: (1) Noble (often outright marvelous) protagonist is forced to leave home or is otherwise displaced from secure existence; (2) protagonist eventually gains supporters/magic helpers (Philetas, Kalasiris, Mithras); (3) protagonist undergoes great struggles and tests, does notable deeds, completes quests (if only to get married or restore lost identities); (4) protagonist returns home or fnds a home with new status. As noted, it can become a symbolic journey to the underworld, or a conquest of the underworld/powers of death, as seen in the myths of Heracles, Odysseus and Aeneas. Later, I detail how Lucius’ virtual death journey begins with his dismounting from his horse Candidus and requesting entry to Milo’s house and extends through his asinine adventures (while he is presumed dead) to Candidus’ unexpected return. In tragedytinged romance, there is often a death struggle such as Achilles, Beowulf, Roland and even Aeneas endure. Such a struggle occurs in Chaereas’ violent battle with Persia, which he undertakes expecting to die Charit. 7.1.5—7. Even when the quest is successful, there is often loss (e.g., the death of the substitute) or the dissolution of the old self or the life lived before. In contrast, in more comedic romance, there is discovery of needed truth, as when Odysseus’ true identity is revealed and his family restored.

Theoretical background  21

Figure 2.1  The career of romance’s hero.

This graphic presents the career of romance’s human-god hero, also ­ guring the reader’s psycho-spiritual quest. The hero starts out in the realm fi of the gods, symbolizing the near-infinite potential of the world the child is born into. The protagonist is forced to live in our world of change and suffering, a figure for the child’s confrontation with the “real world.” This world and its circling seasons represent the cycle of human life and the protagonist’s career, with spring (the time of new birth) being associated with comedy, summer’s blaze with romance, autumn with its loss associated with tragedy and winter (the nadir of hope) representing the essence of irony and satire. The great test is when the hero is trapped/confronted with those ­elements that make existence appear a futile, purposeless infernal machine. The hero’s escape from that hellworld’s bondage and apotheosis figures that recovered sense of plenitude and wonder experienced by an expanded personality along with intimations of the Good, which permit effective action (Russell, Northrop 126–70). For the dying and rising hero, there is often a despairing “my God, why have you forsaken me?” moment preliminary to a new birth. Charikleia has such a trial before the pyre at Memphis. Although Daphnis and Chloe fall into the cyclic natural world, they retain those perspectives that keep life from meaninglessness. Similarly, literature and other

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humanistic production can appear an endless round of sophistic repetition, like Longus’ Gnathon produces, or it can touch on the sublime. The protagonists’ divine beauty implies that they occupy a lower world they do not belong in. During their travels, they descend to an even lower level and, upon their success, again ascend to a higher world, often their true home. In romance’s symbolic geography (Frye, Secular Scripture 97–99), as in much religion and myth, there are three worlds: The highest belongs to the gods; secondly, the world mortals inhabit; and, fnally, the lower, demonic world. Sometimes there is a fourth, a real or virtual paradise (e.g., on the top of Dante’s Mt. Purgatory). This symbolic geography fts our novels fairly well, especially Heliodorus’ Aithiopika. Charikleia, marvelously born, is something of a Platonic form sent from the divine realms to the near-ideal world of Ethiopia. Exiled from her homeland, she “descends” to Greece (the reader’s world!) and, during testing-time, must descend even lower to Egypt and to the horrors of Arsake’s palace, before returning to her original, earthly but paradisical, home. Callirhoe has a similar symbolic career. When this underworld fate is escaped, the protagonist, having in some sense triumphed over death, can become a savior fgure who can rescue others as the sorely tested Demeter and Kore can grant their mystēs a better afterlife. Heracles, returning from Hades, brings Theseus with him; Christian writers narrate Jesus’ harrowing of Hell. Chaereas on his return to Syracuse takes 300 Doric Greeks and an unspecifed number of Egyptians with him, having “harrowed” the Persian hell and returned denizens to his better, Doric, home, and, with the gift of talent and citizenship (at least to the Greeks) he brings them to a more ideal life. The protagonists’ journey: common motifs of descent and ascent29 These themes of descent are connected with real or symbolic challenge to identity, fgured by how Odysseus loses his identity, fghts against those would keep him nameless and fnally regains his full identity in Ithaka. Identity is a central preoccupation of tragedy and comedy, as shown by the importance of anagnōrisis. Virginity and sōphrosynē are of increasing concern for our novels, being metonymies for sexual, psychological and spiritual integrity and thus for preserved identity. This is why, for Frye, as for Bakhtin in a different way, the adventures’ end can be seen as a condition when there is “nothing to write about” and as a return to the individual’s true inner condition, although the protagonists often are transformed externally by the trials (Frye, Secular Scripture 174). The protagonists’ adventures begin with drastic changes of location or social status as they are forced to leave home, exposed as infants, sold into slavery or reduced to poverty. The marvelous child, however, is often raised in a simple or pastoral setting that fgures the prelapsarian paradise. I suggest that Longus found engaging intimations of paradise in pastoral, with its myths of Daphnis and focus on nature, music, simple pleasures and

Theoretical background 23 particularly Eros. There is a pastoral element in the enclosed virgin motif (e.g., the Virgin Mary in art); note how Callirhoe (Charit. 1.1) had never been out in public before, and Xenophon’s Anthia and Charikleia spend a fairly idyllic youth in the temples of Artemis and Apollo. Furthermore, L & K’s initial ekphrasis has Europa abducted from a rural setting (1.1); the beginning of Kleitophon’s seduction plot takes place in a great garden (1.15). Of course, pastoral has always merged the imaginary worlds of simple shepherds with sophisticated content, including the political. After the protagonists’ expulsion, a break in consciousness often occurs (like Callirhoe’s false death), or some sudden, violent change, often found in the protagonist’s capture by pirates or their wandering into a totally alien land (e.g., Egypt or Persia), as was the case for storm-tossed Odysseus after leaving Troy. These adventures often occur in the context of fate, sometimes oppressive,30 as seen in the novels’ oracles, prophecies, dreams and even artworks. The protagonists’ loss of status and freedom of body and mind connects to loss of identity, which in turn connects to images of metamorphosis. Thus, Apuleius’ Lucius literally becomes an ass, and D & C’s myths tell of the transformations of Syrinx,31 Phatta and Echo. A displaced version of metamorphoses is located in disguises that the characters assume, in their reluctance to use their real names (Anthia, Leukippe, Charikleia) or in the protagonists’ inability to be recognized by their loved ones—Theagenes, long separated from Charikleia, cuffs her, thinking her a madwoman (7.7). Second selves and evil doppelgangers appear;32 thus, Thisbe is an alternate Charikleia and the unnamed murdered woman Leukippe’s substitute. Logically, the lowest realms are more flled with nightmare images of isolation, torture, confnement, of a human being turned into a thing, or an object of food, obscene sex, absurdity, confnement in a prison33 or labyrinth or underground34 by an irresistible demonic power. The underworld’s demonic trial offers the horror of being publicly known and exposed by others for inscrutable reasons, a motif emphasized in Apuleius’ Risus festival (Met. 3.2-10) as well as during the proceedings at Babylon, which Callirhoe was not told about, and is profoundly embarrassed by 5.4.13–5.5.1. The demonic trial’s charges are groundless or its laws absurd; accordingly, the innocent Charikleia is tried for Kybele’s death, Habrocomes is condemned as the murderer of Cyno’s husband and Kleitophon allows himself to be tried for Leukippe’s murder. The virginity tests, seen in Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, are another variant of the exposure trial.35 Yet the lower world is not always a purely negative realm of pain and darkness; sometimes it is a Bower of Bliss, a Venusberg, a realm like Calypso’s (Frye, Secular Scripture 123–24), whose very pleasantness and security threaten the protagonist’s identity, as seen in Callirhoe as Dionysius provides a real temptation for Callirhoe. Just as in folktale the giant’s wife helps the hero against her ogre-husband, so our heroes sometimes fnd helpers in the lower world, such as the wife of Artaxerxes who befriends Callirhoe (Charit. 8.3.7) or Amphinomus who aids Anthia cast into a pit (4.6).

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More  positively, the lower world can be the source of mysterious wealth or secret knowledge, such as Jason fnds when he descends to Aeetes’ realm for the golden feece or when Aeneas visits Anchises in the underworld (Frye, Secular Scripture 122; Balfour 60). Chaereas and Callirhoe, Charikleia and Theagenes and even Lucius clearly gain knowledge from their wanderings in the lower worlds, as do some of the protagonists of Wonders Beyond Thule. In more tragedy-tinged romance, only a remnant fnds salvation. Sometimes there is the real or implied death of a substitute. Odysseus is the only Ithakan to return home; note nearly the entire crew who sailed with Anthia and Habrocomes are left to die (Xen. Eph. 1.14); only Chaereas and Polycharmus survive their vessel’s destruction; later, the Egyptian king and his land army are defeated, while Chaereas’ Greeks at sea survive. In the more comic novels, as noted, the evil-doers often suffer mild punishment or are rehabilitated. In romance, magicians (such as Prospero) often relinquish their magic (Frye, Secular Scripture 144), a motif illustrated by Kalasiris’ peaceful death. A common motif presents a young hero having a problematical, incapacitated or disposed father, the effects of whose weakness the young hero must overcome (Dowden, “Fluctuating Meanings” 221–43). In tragedy, the son/child is often the ruin of his father/parent (Oedipus, Mordred, Hippolytus), while in more ideal narratives, the son is the salvation of the father/parent (Jason, Aeneas, Orestes, Arthur, Hamlet). Note today how many movie series (e.g., Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Artemis Fowl) show young people, even children, rescuing their parents and otherwise saving the world. Chaereas’ father Ariston, Hydaspes, Dionysophanes and Apollonius of Tyre ft this paradigm, and their children correspondingly rescue or redeem them. The themes and images of ascent are linked to themes of the resumption of identity, fertility, freedom and community (Frye, Secular Scripture 129–57). The ultimate quest object is for the fulfllment of desire, superfcially some object connected with fertility, wealth or other need, but, more primally, a (more) secure identity. This motif is seen in Chaereas’ recovery of Callirhoe and defeat of Persia, which also secures the protagonists’ adult identities. Identity lost during descent is recovered, a motif paramount in the Metamorphoses, as Lucius resumes his human form.36 It is seen as Charikleia, and Daphnis and Chloe recover their lost identities, histories and social positions. In a displaced version, Anthia is discovered while under an assumed name, as are Leukippe and Charikleia. Tokens often are important for recognition (e.g., Longus and Heliodorus). The recognition scene often involves solving a complex puzzle, the benefcent counterpoint to the descent’s threatening complications. This is particularly obvious in the exasperating paradoxes Charikleia presents to Hydaspes, as well as in the conclusion of Apollonius King of Tyre, as Tarsia and Apollonius solve the riddles posed by each other’s identity. While marriage (or its preservation) is a common goal of romance, it is particularly linked to the theme of the recovery of identity, especially in regard to a mysterious birth, and thus in

Theoretical background 25 the novels of Heliodorus and Longus, the solution of the birth mystery leads to marriage. There often occurs the real or symbolic recovery of memory, and thus of history, as, for example, Persinna and the parents of Daphnis and Chloe recount repressed family tragedies. In contrast to the descent’s demonic trial, the just trial results in the exposure of falsehood, the revelation of truth and the breaking of the power of some absurd or evil law, as when the Ethiopians’ barbaric custom of human sacrifce is abolished in Heliodorus’ novel, and the virginity test produces a triumphant vindication of Charikleia’s virtue. The complex trial at the end of L & K, however comic/ironic, also fts this model; not only is the evil Thersandros exposed and driven away, but the absurdity of the chastity ordeals is manifested by the exoneration of both Leukippe and Melite. In the ascent, there is often a corresponding movement back home, or to the proper point of origin, as with Charikleia. In its more ideal form (Xenophon of Ephesus, Heliodorus or Longus), there is a sense of a circle closed, but it is not another turn of the wheel that must be repeated again; rather the circle is more like a spiral, where “the end is the beginning transformed by the heroic quest” (Frye, Secular Scripture 174). There is an atmosphere of a renewal of purity, of time reborn or benefcent cycles of time being revealed, and fate no longer baleful. The recognition episode sometimes includes a moment of epiphany, when protagonists imagine they see some greater cosmic plan. Lucius has such an experience on the beach and during the Isis procession, as does Kalasiris reading Persinna’s tania (Heliod. 4.8). The returned Chaereas attempted to provide such a vision before the Syracusan crowd, but it is Callirhoe, praying before Aphrodite’s statue, who has the truer (if sadder) enlightenment. A major irony in L & K is how Kleitophon gains no substantial understanding of love, despite his sufferings and adventures. The ideal novels can tend toward the apocalyptic/eschatological vision, Spenser’s “Sabaoth’s sight” (Mutabilitie Cantos 7.8.2).37 Critics, such as Frazer and Frye, saw the dying and (sometimes) rising god as a central myth of much Mediterranean myth and religion, seen particularly in the myth of Kore and Demeter as well as those of Osiris and Isis, Attis and Cybele, Adonis and Aphrodite and, of course, Jesus. It is a myth tied to the alternation of seasonal vegetation, but it also evokes the sacrifce of the virgin and innocent needed to keep the less innocent world going. It also fgures the young person’s maturation, as well as being a metaphor for spiritual death and rebirth. On the contrary, the non-tragic, romantic and comic view of love presents a death to be followed by a better rebirth (Frye, Anatomy 36 and 43). Indeed, two mythic paradigms compete, the frst Frazer’s sacrifced god or king, including various obligatory sacrifces of innocents, for Frye, a demonic vision. In contrast stands the savior-god who suffers and dies, but is raised to a greater type of being, effecting a positive transformation of the world. Our novels’ frequent false deaths partially refect this pattern. In the most ideal form, the resurrection is followed by an assumption, as the resurrected Jesus ascends to heaven, Psyche to Olympus and Lucius to

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Rome. The ideal bond between lovers can stand for the ideal society; consider the scene wherein Odysseus and Penelope retire to a bed tenaciously rooted in the very earth they rule, to enact a type of hieros gamos. Thus, the more comedic romances end with festival, such as the multiple marriages that end Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Similar conclusions occur in the wedding ceremonies that conclude the novels of Longus, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Chariton and the author of Apollonius King of Tyre; the fnale of Xenophon’s Ephesiaka asserts that protagonists’ whole subsequent life was one great festival (5.15). Apuleius’ fable of Cupid and Psyche offers (admittedly ironically) a nearly undisplaced vision of apocalyptic unity, as love and the soul are married on Olympus, and even the formerly evil Venus, reconciled, dances at their wedding, a marriage producing the child Voluptas (Frye, Secular Scripture 166). This reformed, inclusive and festal world appears in D & C’s wedding scene (4.38). In apocalyptic/eschatological texts, a superior society emerges, often due to a radical break with history (e.g., Armageddon), and a messiah-like fgure sometimes appears;38 Charikleia’s peculiar origin (Heliod. 4.8.4) and even appearance suggest such a transformational fgure; a historical break occurs when Hydaspes abolishes human sacrifce and Charikleia is revealed as his daughter, a being transcending confning conceptions of race and ethnicity, being in some sense Greek, Egyptian, Ethiopian and Other. The past is reconstructed (note their replay of the Perseus and Andromeda legend) and redeemed by the future, a constant promise of apocalyptic discourse.39 The wedding of Charikleia and Theagenes, the union of the priest of the Sun with the priestess of the Moon, symbolic of cosmic unity, takes place via paradoxical revelations at a critical juncture in Meroe’s history. As Andromeda married a noble Greek and with him restored a kingdom, so Charikleia will marry a Greek who claims descent from the original Hellenes; these repetitions and renewals of prior events suggest a return to the primordial creation time (which pastoral also reproduces),40 again making the novel’s events’ part of a profound cosmic/historical pattern. The marvelous child A major paradigm is the “marvelous child.” Otto Rank compiled an impressive list of myths concerning the births of heroes sharing similar elements.41 Here I present basic components, with details later: (1) The children have a mysterious birth from higher beings, at least one parent is a god, king, queen, princess etc.; (2) the birth has marvelous aspects; the mother is a virgin, or barren, the parent is a god, there are various miracles or divine premonitions, and the protagonist’s career is wrapped up in the divine plan; (3) there are diffculties (ruler, father or a relative tries to kill child, mother is exiled due to suspicions of adultery, mother dies giving birth, etc.); this evil is a felix culpa, the necessary prelude to the marvelous child’s career; (4) child is sent away, exiled or abandoned, losing its birthright, or knowledge

Theoretical background 27 of its identity; the child is often sent away on water, or abandoned in a wilderness setting, such as mountains or caves; (5) the child is often rescued by animals or people of a lower (or at least very different) class, and is raised by them in (relative) pastoral innocence, reproducing humankind’s primordial guiltlessness; (6) the young hero often shows remarkable abilities; (7) the child discovers its distinguished parents, its origins and true nature; (8) heroic or notable deeds are performed, quite often consisting of a heroic avenging, rescue or betterment of a parent or people; an extensive journey or quest (along with all the components common to the quest) can also appear; the marvelous child, like Jesus, can be something of a savior fgure; (9) there is the acquisition of honors and rank (sometimes divine; [Sowa 146]), which can include marriage, and distribution of rewards to friends and allies. One initial example, with details to come. Daphnis and Chloe’s parents, Mytilene’s leading citizens, expose their children for selfsh reasons. The children, exposed in a pastoral setting, are subsequently suckled by a goat and a sheep, then raised by shepherds, being in the countryside but not fully of it. As a preparation for their love and marriage, Eros sends them out as goatherd and shepherdess. Their personal quest is to discover knowledge of love and sex and get married. But more importantly, they must reclaim their identity and assume their roles as high-order aristocrats. As leaders, they will harmonize the realms of the natural, human and divine worlds, as fgured by their wedding with its eschatological overtones. Fitting the comic paradigms, there is a revelation of past bitter truths and wrongs made right, with problematical characters (Gnathon, Lycaenion, Lampis and Dorcon) partially redeemed. The myth of Chloe, illustrated by the cave’s painting and then the novel, can enlighten D & C’s readers. Other major archetypal patterns The pattern “a goddess among mortals” is ideal in its implication that the gods, or godlike beings, can live among humans, assist them and inspire human lives; many of our female protagonists, and some male protagonists, are referred to as divinities. Our heroines are of supernatural beauty, sometimes mistaken for goddesses, described as if a goddess, or sometimes as a god’s statue. Thus, Chariton’s Callirhoe is the agalma of Syracuse (1.1.1) and is compared to, mistaken for and worshipped as a goddess.42 Callirhoe is brought up in sheltered seclusion in an exemplary Syracuse, recalling the enclosed (often marvelous) virgin. Dionysius, encountering Callirhoe at Aphrodite’s shrine, assumes she is that goddess (2.3.6-7). Later Statira mistakes Callirhoe for a goddess, and the Great King will wonder whether she is divine (6.3.1 and 6.3.5). Chaereas, fnding Callirhoe’s tomb empty, wonders if he had possessed a goddess for a wife (3.3.5-6). As Dionysius heads toward Babylon, he compares himself to Menelaus, husband of Helen, originally a goddess (5.2.8). As Callirhoe travels to Asia, rumor races ahead, and whole cities turn out as if to see a divinity (4.7.5-7). Finally, when Callirhoe

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returns home, the Syracusans too compare her to Aphrodite rising from the sea (8.6.11). An associated pattern involves the all-conquering hero or god. In Greek myth, Dionysos and his retinue marched to India to manifest his arrival as an important deity, and Alexander actually sought evidence of Dionysos’ travels, which he emulated (Bosworth 117–32). Callirhoe, Aphrodite’s instantiation, has an erotic anabasis from Syracuse to Babylon, dominating the leading men of Sicily, Ionia and Persia.43 Less positively, this idealization frames a woman as a controlled object, as shown particularly by Ovid’s Pygmalion myth. Heliodorus’ Charikles works hard at making his daughter Charikleia into his image (2.22.3; Whitmarsh, “Birth” 107–08) and compares her to a statue (2.33.3). Later, she stands before the Ethiopians more like a statue than a mortal woman (10.9.3); Apuleius’ Psyche is admired like a simulacrum fabre politum (4.32). Another pattern involves a goddess forced to associate with mortals (Sowa 39–66 and 281), as Aphrodite is forced by Zeus to love Anchises. In Chariton, Dionysius, who has mistaken Callirhoe for a goddess and is suspicious of the circumstances of her purchase, declares: “Even divine beings are at certain times caught in the grip of destiny and compelled to associate with human beings—poets and historians tell us that” (2.4.8). This pattern also connects to the “marriage of the fertility goddess” pattern (Sowa 39–66), a union that can bring men honor as well as fertility and other benefts to the land, as the marriage of Callirhoe brings honor to Chaereas and benefts to Syracuse. Heliodorus’ novel previews a theme more common in medieval romance: the sexual quest ending in marriage being transmuted into a spiritual quest for true virginity, that is, the protagonist’s restored and unspoiled nature (Frye, Secular Scripture 151–54). Somewhat similar is the “female sacrifce” pattern, concerning an act that brings wealth or other benefts to the community, which has a demonic vector, as in Inanna-Ishtar’s descent into the underworld in which she is stripped naked and hung from a beam (Pritchard 108).44 Many cultures have myths that narrate how, in a primordial time, a young person was slain to accomplish something—to abate divine vengeance (Iphigeneia), found a city (Jepthah’s daughter) or to secure a victory (Menoecius). This is often a sacrifce the worshippers’ community still profits from, or repeats. The young person is often near marriage-age or even about to be married. Often the young person is saved at the last moment, such as Iphigeneia and Isaac, with a substitute (such as a deer or ram) provided. The myths of a sacrifced youth are often connected to real initiation rituals, and the language of initiation rituals often mentions the killing of the initiates or their dying, or how sacrifces are performed as a substitute for the death of the youth.45 Myth transforms a symbolic death into a real one, and this helps explain the large number of sacrifced heroines found in myth, as well as those nearly sacrifced in our novels and connects to the novel’s “false deaths.”46 In the “withdrawal and return of the god”47 pattern, a god disappears and takes the whole of life with him, devastating the community, is then

Theoretical background 29 searched for by the community, brought back and often is appeased by a ritual, as seen in the withdrawal and return of Achilles (Burkert, Structure 124–25). This pattern connects with the “rape/abduction of the goddess” archetype,48 which (in my synthesis) has these segments: (1) The heroine is secluded in some usually positive manner; (3) the girl is separated from family/her innocent childhood or abducted/raped by some god; (4) undergoes trials (such as wanderings); (5) the grieved party searches for the abductee; (6) the heroine is rescued or returns in some way; (7) sometimes claims are settled and the loser learns of the arrangements that must be made, with a payment of some kind required. There is often resulting beneft to the community; sometimes, too, the protagonist’s return is accomplished at considerable cost, such as the real or symbolic death of a substitute (e.g., Patroclus) or some loss of the protagonist’s self. For example, Callirhoe is raised in seclusion, and, after abduction, her loss is felt by the Syracusans as if their city had fallen (1.5.1). Discussion in public assembly is followed by a search by the whole community; when Callirhoe is returned, Chaereas’ letter to the Great King, Callirhoe’s letter to Dionysius and the way Callirhoe leaves her son with Dionysius represents the negotiations and payment involved in the heroine’s return, as well as the heroine’s own substantial loss. The recognition scene, when Callirhoe returns to Syracuse (Charit. 1.5.1), has ritualist, revelatory aspects. Similarly, Charikleia is separated from her mother Persinna, lives a semi-idyllic life, frst with the Ethiopian shepherds and then as a priestess in Delphi, and is abducted by Theagenes with the help of the priest Kalasiris. Charikleia is then searched for by the Delphic community and her Greek father. She suffers numerous tribulations, including wanderings in Egypt, and is fnally returned to her true Merotic home in a manner that will bring great good to the whole community. The complicated trial scene at the end represents those negotiations needed for Charikleia’s return.49 In the “wanderings caused by angry god” pattern, protagonists (Odysseus, Io and daughters of Proitos) endure wandering caused by some irate deity. This theme is explicit in Xenophon of Ephesus, where Habrocomes arrogantly insults Eros (1.1-2); likewise, the oracle that causes the parents of Habrocomes and Anthia to send their children out on dangerous adventures recall the oracles that Io’s father received ordering him to expel his daughter.50 Although Chariton’s text indicates that Aphrodite is only angry at Chaereas (8.1.3), Callirhoe considers herself Aphrodite’s victim (Charit. 2.2.7-8, 3.8, 3.10.6 and 7.5.3) and at the end ascribes her troubles to Aphrodite (8.8.13). Note Callirhoe’s cry before Aphrodite’s statue at Arados: My lady, that is enough. How long are you going to be at war with me? I may really have given you offense; but you have punished me for it. Perhaps my ill-starred beauty evoked your indignation; but it has been my ruin. (7.5.3)

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Apuleius’ Psyche is driven from her home due her resemblance to Venus.51 Callirhoe and Anthia are so beautiful they are mistaken for goddesses, who, as other myths make clear, are easily upset by such comparisons. But, as in the Odyssey, reconciliation with the angered god is possible. Aphrodite is willing to forgive Chaereas, and Venus will dance at Psyche’s wedding. Charikleia comes to understand how her sufferings align with the divine plan; however, in the satirical/ironizing novels of Achilles Tatius and Apuleius, there seems an arbitrary and amoral aspect to the divine workings. The Demeter and Kore myth The narrative of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter is an elaborate combination of several mythic patterns and uniquely complex.52 The fundamental element is the angry withdrawal of the goddess Demeter occasioned by her daughter’s abduction, which brings about an initial search before Demeter is informed about the abductor’s identity, being the god of the Underworld, which gives subsequent events considerable symbolic meaning. The underworld is a source of wealth, and thus, a return of fertility and wealth is in agreement with the motifs of the god (often sacrifced) whose return brings back wealth from its source. There appear the themes of the protagonist’s resurrection and the death of the substitute, with Persephone having to return to Hades. The Demeter-Kore myth shows similarities to another mythic pattern, wherein a goddess descends into the underworld to bring back a loved one whom the ruler of the dead wishes to retain; there are negotiations that result in the loved one being shared between the upper and lower worlds.53 In the Telepinus myth, the angered god had to be appeased through negotiation and ritual; this likewise holds true in Demeter’s case, as Zeus is forced to negotiate with her. As a result, a new regime of power relations is established, in which humanity obtains a useful place. Humans learn the rites of Eleusis and gain a closer relationship with Demeter and Kore, who can now help them both in matters of agricultural fertility and in confronting death. Even Demeter herself is changed, becoming more acquainted with the human condition through her special experiences among humans. This myth complex is recalled by Callirhoe’s adventures; both Callirhoe and Kore are abducted from Sicily and endure symbolic death,54 and are compelled by trickery and forced to undergo marriages with somebody of undoubted nobility; both Demeter and Chaereas, pursing their abducted loved one, are disguised and endure servitude. Due to Kore’s loss, Demeter, being thwarted by Metaneira and thus unable to create a substitute for Kore, allows the terrestrial farmlands to be devastated; likewise, all Syracuse grieves Callirhoe’s loss (1.5.1). The journey forces both heroines to visit a realm they have no experience of. Both are forced or tricked into undergoing marriages with somebody of undoubted nobility and both are sought after by entities through whose efforts they are eventually returned to their homeland. Zeus initially gave Kore to Hades but was forced to acknowledge

Theoretical background 31 Demeter’s power; like Zeus, Chariton’s Artaxerxes assigns Callirhoe to Dionysius (7.5.15), but he is forced (see Chaereas’ letter at 8.4.2-5) to accept Callirhoe’s return. As Hades obtained a message through Hermes to release Kore, Dionysius receives a message from the Great King and a letter from Callirhoe (8.5.6) detailing the fnal arrangements concerning Callirhoe and their child. Both heroines remain tied to the other realm; Kore must return yearly to Hades and Callirhoe leaves her child with Dionysius, perhaps as a kind of payment. Kore and Demeter receive new honors after their return, and likewise, Chaereas and Callirhoe return with new status and riches. Because Kore crosses borders to the inaccessible world of Hades, she obtains experience of a previously unknown realm and can help humans in their relations with that realm; in Callirhoe’s travels she, too, gains much experience of previously unknown eastern areas, and in Callirhoe’s friendship with Statira (8.47–49) a new relationship between the opposed realms of West and East is forged. Several other patterns, themes and images could have been included, but I hope the above makes clear how deeply these archetypal images and themes permeate our novels and infuence their interpretations. Patterns evoking philosophy and religion also infuse meaning into our novels.

Elements of religion, philosophy and paideia A story world’s religious and philosophical elements logically refect on the possibilities of the protagonists’ success both in love and in life. They also furnish structures upon which writers and readers can project their ideal dreams concerning such a world, but this does not prove that the author thinks the element used is possible. Religion connects with the ideal belief/ hope that there exist “supernatural” beings/forces able to be interacted with to improve human life.55 Philosophy more boldly assumes that the divine, natural and human worlds are comprehensible in ways that allow valid human activity. As Apuleius, Lucian and Aelius Aristides show, sophisticated readers could have a considerable longing for a religion that provided rescue from life’s horrors, and many such readers would have responded to this ideal dimension. Religion I distinguish three kinds of religious elements: (1) Those connected with a frm religious belief, as in “Christian” novellas such as the Acts of Thecla; (2) religious elements that are simply customary genre elements, refecting no real belief, as the pagan mythological references in Claudian’s Epithalamium of Honorius and Maria; (3) religious elements that refect a strongly held fantasy, desire or aspiration, which the author and his readers can participate in imaginatively. To explain (3), consider Heliodorus’ Aithiopika: Morgan (Ethiopian Story 350–51) has called the Aithiopika “religiose,” while

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Bowie (“Greek Novel” 696) admits that these religious elements would have been much more evident to Heliodorus’ original readership. I believe that Heliodorus has religious and philosophical “serious intentions” (Dowden, “Heliodorus”). Consider Beloved by Toni Morrison, which describes various powerful supernatural events. Does such a novel imply that Morrison believes such supernatural events possible in our world? Of course not. Both novels create an imaginatively believable world by exploiting the potential for the uncanny that exists in our own world. Longus likewise draws upon religious-philosophical dreams. Apuleius does this to an even greater degree, but only for the sake of the constant, terrible irony that these religious hopes are shown to be mostly baleful delusions. Chariton’s Callirhoe mostly presents religion as part of the necessary plot machinery, furnishing a type of special effect, as when Callirhoe’s dazzling appearance at Babylon is likened to the revelation of the mysteries (5.3). As the public and private life of the Greco-Roman world was flled with elements of the gods and their worship,56 including matters of law and material culture, so our novels refect a confusing multiplicity of the gods and practices—amoral super-beings, maintainers of cosmic order and human justice, transcendent spirits or even farcical fgures. Visible, too, is the power of Fortune/Tychē, or various daimones or spirits, as well as various ritual practices (sacrifces, prayers and oracles) and items of material culture (statues, altars and temples). Our major protagonists think themselves victims of savage fortune or baleful spirits. The protagonists of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus and Heliodorus will discover an ultimately benefcent (at least to them) divine order; in Achilles Tatius, the divine order is whimsical and amoral, while in Apuleius, it is arbitrary, cruel and deceitful. During the protagonists’ journeys, temples, shrines, altars, etc., give them something to connect with, making religious practice the true cultural universal (Perkins, Suffering Self 49). Religion and its evil twin, magic, illustrate the demonic (such as in scenes of human sacrifce), necromancy and outright fraud (as evident in Heliodorus and Apuleius). There seemed an increasing sense that a deeper engagement with the gods was possible through the rites of mystery religions, oracles, dreams (see Aelius Aristides), intense forms of prayer or contemplation, miracle workers or occult practices.57 Theosophy, as found in Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic philosophy (illustrated by Kalasiris) openly merged the philosophical and religious; but long before this, the philosophical and religious imagination had interpenetrated. With time, novels become more encyclopedic, and authors added religious or philosophical elements to display their learning (as in Apuleius!). Indeed, our novels can be read as aretalogies and hagiographies, narratives often with novelist features (Beck, “Mystery Religions”). This aretalogical dimension is explicit in D & C and implied in Xenophon of Ephesus.58 As Mithras the Isis priest observes, Lucius’ career likewise serves as praise for Isis (Winkler, Auctor 233–45). Heliodorus’ novel, centered on the marvelous Charikleia resembles a hagiography, as even does Chariton’s Callirhoe; that novel’s coda underscores the

Theoretical background 33 struggles of the virtual goddess Callirhoe, as at the end she prays before the statue of Aphrodite, the declared motivator of her adventures (8.8). An abiding metaphor for life and education is a journey with hardship, surprises and, possibly, enlightenment. Hesiod described virtue’s steep path (Op. 286–92) seen later in Prodicus’ “Choice of Heracles”; Apuleius offers a “Choice of Lucius” (Finkelpearl, “Judgment”). Mystery rites fgure such a trip, and philosophy likewise is a series of doctrines that can furnish that rigorous way of life seen in biographies of saints and later works such as Pilgrim’s Progress. Just as in our novels’ era there appears a greater valuation of the emotional and educational dimensions of private life, so new dynamic and personal cults gave individuals a sense of greater individual engagement with the divine,59 although current scholarship stresses how worshippers sought greater help in this life and were not that focused on life hereafter, which again fts well the aim of our ideal novels, where the main focus is a better life though love in this world. As noted, numerous narrative and symbolic patterns our erotic novels share with mystery religion lead to notions, largely rejected, that they were mystery texts;60 instead, narratives of romance and of mystery religion stem from similar psychological processes through which individuals establish or change their identity,61 as well as structural motivations to recast the world in more favorable terms (Reardon, Form 173). What most mattered was what the initiate experienced, less what particular doctrines were learned. Accordingly, romantic love, with its unexpected vicissitudes, strong emotions, the sense that lovers engage fundamental powers and life alterations that unfold in time, serves as a fgure for a mystery rite or a religious or philosophic career. The struggles of female Christian saints in the service of Divine love duplicate many elements found in the erotic protagonists’ pursuit of romantic love. Our novels’ protagonists, who recall marvelous children (e.g., Daphnis and Chloe and Charikleia), are mistaken for gods (Callirhoe, Anthia, Psyche) or serve as priestess-substitutes (Anthia, Charikleia) or endure some form of death and rebirth (Callirhoe, Chaereas, Anthia, Leukippe, Charikleia, Lucius), can function as displaced versions of divine beings in mystery rituals and suggest that terrestrial (but aristocratic) human life can relive these divine patterns and gain the summum bonum of love. Sex itself can reveal deeper, sometimes surprising, dimensions of self and one’s relationship with another. Plato had seen sex as a form of initiation (Symp. 209e–210a); a frequent novel motif is the experience of sex and love as akin to initiation into the mysteries.62 The step-by-step ritual sufferings of the participants in mystery cult produced feelings that made  the subsequent closer relationship to the god emotionally believable. Like the steps in a ritual, the romance plot is somewhat standardized; because the participant/reader knows what is coming, the preprogrammed response can more easily arise.63 Judging from how its plot inspired Heliodorus, the wanderings of Anthia and Habrocomes serve to teach, test and prove the protagonists’ excellence

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as a prelude to a type of personal, although divinely sent, happiness. Not only is Heliodorus’ Charikleia priestess of Artemis who becomes priestess of the Moon, but all her virtual fathers (Charikles, Kalasiris, Sisimithres and Hydapses) serve priestly functions. There is an anagogic quality to the fable of Meroe, the novel’s true center; its exoticness and utopian mythology is Other enough to allow extreme ideal possibility, yet does not present pure “alien wisdom,” for its theosophy is perfectly compatible with Greek thought, and it requires infusions of Greekness (Perseus, Theagenes, the Hellenized Charikleia). The implication here is that Meroe has simply fulflled potentials in Greek culture. Longus uses the seasonal structure, pastoral evocations of times of prior perfection, Platonic and Orphic themes, plus references to Dionysos (e.g., “Dionysophanes”), to suggest a revelation of the works of Eros/Dionysos. The anagogic implication is that in increased contact with nature and through the power of good art to improve nature, a superior combination of the divine, human and natural worlds, infused with love and its gods, managed by Dionysos, might be forged. As I show, the seemingly joyful Isis initiation, where Lucius claims to see the chthonic gods faceto-face, can be read as only the last, somewhat deceptive, stage of a longer series of initiatory tests that begin when a problematical Lucius seeks admission to Milo’s house, subsequently marked out for sacrifce at the Risus festival, soon afterward disconnected from human comforts and protections and forced to wander and suffer as an ass, during which time Lucius is permanently lamed in mind and spirit, the necessary prelude to his rebirth as the sterile, uncritically obedient servant of Isis and the Rome’s imperium. Philosophy Philosophy, in turn, generally stresses a deeper understanding that provides a guide to life which religion does not necessarily demand. Daphnis and Chloe have considerable connection with divine forces, but little philosophical understanding. The philosophoi and their schools, especially in the Eastern Roman Empire, would have been a notable, and occasionally threatening and even resisted, cultural presence (Trapp, “What” 12–15). As Dio of Prusa, Lucian, Aelius Aristides and others show, philosophic schools offered a substitute for religion among the educated, especially later Platonism. Greco-Roman philosophy was both a series of doctrines and sometimes a countercultural lifestyle, one opposed to the pursuit of wealth, power, fame, as Longinus stresses (Subl. 7.1; Connor 4). D & C, Aithiopika, L & K and even the Metamorphoses are informed with philosophical elements that offer impressions of deeper issues being addressed while refecting cultural realities, often in ironized form. Thus in Callirhoe, at the suggestion of returning Callirhoe, a robber objects: “Are you telling us now to act the philosopher?” (1.10). Later, Chaereas, planning to return, Statira and reconcile with the Great King, chooses as his ambassador an Egyptian called Demetrius, “a philosopher who was known to the King of Persia; he

Theoretical background 35 was advanced in years and superior to the other Egyptians in culture and character” (8.3). Kleitophon absorbs Thersandros’ beatings philosophically (5.24), later tells Melite that they should play the philosopher and stay chaste until they reach land (5.16.7), calls Melite’s seductive jailhouse discourse “philosophical” (5.27) and informs Leukippe’s father that he and Leukippe have been philosophers in respect to sex (8.5.7). Theron ridicules Leukippe’s claims to virginity and asks if she fell in with a group of philosophic pirates (6.21; Morales, Vision 57–60). Lucius watches an exhibition of sword swallowing near the Stoa Poikile (1.3–4). Particularly popular were various forms of Platonism, especially the Phaedrus and the Symposium.64 Such philosophical idealism posits an ideal realm (e.g., the Beautiful and Good) that can be communed with, as love (Platonic and otherwise) and increasingly rarifed desire propel humans toward their original perfection, a philosophical justifcation for the emergence of the ideal. A philosophic debate over love’s nature was a standard topic of progymnasmata.65 Longus’ frame narrator promises to teach love’s nature, and his subsequent novel contains various theosophic elements concerning love. The center of Longus’ Plato-inspired Eros-philosophy is a saving vision of the beautiful, recalling the Symposium and Agathon’s praise of Eros (Repath, “Platonic Love”; Morgan, Daphnis 179 ff.). L & K’s frame narrator presents his novels’ initial setting in Phaedrean terms, and often (and with similar irony) Kleitophon invests his tale with ironized Platonica.66 Charikleia and Theagenes falling into love at frst sight suggest notions of preexistence (3.5.4–5 and 4.10). The Metamorphoses’ Platonica are likewise numerous and ironized, with Lucius’ downfall beginning when, in slippery terrain, he dismounts from “Candidus” his Phaedrean white horse (1.2). Platonically infected Stoicism is another infuence. Thus, Xenophon of Ephesus stresses Stoic notions of the soul’s freedom to overcome temptations and tortures, especially regarding Habrocomes. Iambulus’ account of the Islands of the Sun refected Stoic theories on living the simple, ordered life according to nature (Möllendorff) and, with its description of ideal climate and worship of the Sun and Moon, also infuenced Heliodorus’ conception of Meroe (Futre Pinheiro, “Utopia”). Neopythagorean, Platonic and Stoic-Cynic views of the ideal King as embodying a ruling, universal logos likewise earlier infuenced Chariton (Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 139–41). I show later how a greater valuation of women and erotic relationships was offered by Stoic and later Platonic philosophers, such as Musonius Rufus and particularly Plutarch in his Eroticus, Advice to the Bride and Groom and Consolation to His Wife. The novels generally subordinate philosophic concerns to romantic ones. This can be partially explained by the era’s increasing subordination of philosophy to rhetoric (Corsino 9, citing Marrou 283), not necessarily a bad development. Platonic, as well as Christian theology, often posits more pandemic theology for the masses, and a truer one for the elite. Erotic engagement can produce a kind of popular philosophic knowledge, although

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this education is often presented ironically; in D & C, Astylus, listening to Gnathon’s justifcation of his love for Daphnis, remarks that “Eros makes great sophists” (4.18.1), and Eros is likewise a sophist in L & K (1.10 and 5.27). As noted above, philosophy was often connected to a lifelong cultivation of the long, hard road to enlightenment, with a need for experienced masters (see Kalasiris, Philetas and even, ironically, Kleitophon’s friend Kleinias). But the goal of the novels for the protagonists to get married and become high-status aristocrats; the long road to fnd love becomes a kind of substitute for philosophical struggle. However, in the novels of Heliodorus (serious) and Apuleius (deeply ironic), the ideal dream appears in how the protagonists’ adventures end in something like true religious and philosophic enlightenment. Paideia The possession of paideia, demonstrated by public conduct, defned the elite Greco-Roman social class and justifed their social and political preeminence over the masses and separated them from barbarians, slaves and social inferiors. One ideal (if problematical) vector was its assertion of Hellenic cultural superiority as a counter to Roman political power and pressures to assimilate. Precisely because of its immense social and ideological weight, attitudes toward its value and application were complex and ambivalent. I show how Apuleius, Lucian and Achilles Tatius reveal how Greek paideia does not necessarily ennoble, but gives depravity (and stupidity—see the Aesop Romance) the gloss of refnement. For example, Kleitophon and Charmides use sophistry for seduction (4.3–5), and everything Kleitophon sees, thinks and does appear infused with sophistry. In contrast, instead of being refexive sophists, Daphnis and Chloe, a happier couple, tend to think very literally. Apuleius’ Lucius even more deeply discredits the value of paideia. Heliodorus’ Charikleia is a paragon of paideia, yet even she learns paideia’s limits, needing Odyssean tricky and trust in revelation to gain her happy end.

Myth revised, history transformed, the sublime encountered Greco-Roman myths were always capable of literary revision. “Homer’s” epics altered older traditions, and tragedians (Euripides) and philosophers (Plato) fashioned variants on old myths or created new ones. Attic potters created a series of labors for Theseus to match those of Heracles. Such revisions proliferated in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, a process prompted by contacts with new cultures and, perhaps, a greater openness to forms of literary innovation (Bowersock, “Fiction” 1–28). This refashioning could be quite radical, as seen in the Trojan revisions of Dares and Dictys, or in Dio of Prusa’s 11th discourse, which denied that the Greeks had taken Troy. Some non-Greek cities forged Greek identities to enter Hadrian’s

Theoretical background 37 Panhellenion (Romeo). Especially important here is Vergil’s Aeneid, which revises the myths of Homer and the matter of Troy, Jason and Medea and even Plato’s Republic to create a grandly positive (although tragedy marred) history of Aeneas and the Roman state. Myth revised Our novels revise customary themes and narratives of Greco-Roman myth and literature to give happier and sometimes more world-signifcant outcomes to the protagonists’ erotic adventures. This extends the contrast between the darkly tragic Iliad and the Odyssey and its folktale-derived Odysseus, whose career suggests that for the resourceful and lucky, happy endings are possible. Heliodorus’ Charikleia and Theagenes replay the foundational Ethiopian myth of Andromeda and Perseus. The career of Theagenes adds a positive conclusion to tragic histories of his doomed ancestors, Achilles and Neoptolemus. The couple’s god-directed travels revise the wandering myths of Odysseus, Jason and Medea, and Aeneas and the Trojans. As the Trojans must fnd their true, original home in Italy, one prompted by sexual scandal (Paris and the Trojan war)—which will result in new divinely sanctioned governmental structure—so Charikleia, originally exiled due to the scandal of her white appearance, seeks her true home in Meroe, where she and Theagenes will end the custom of human sacrifce and bring a greater harmony to the social orders. While culturally Greek, Charikleia is still an eastern priestess with special qualities whom Theagenes feigns to abduct as Jason seem to abduct Medea. The Aithiopika reverses the career of Odysseus who, having left home, struggles in various non-Greek lands to preserve his life and identity on his mission to restore his family and kingdom. Odysseus must avoid various non-Greek females (Circe, Calypso and Nausicaä) who want him to stay with them. Charikleia, like Odysseus, must regain a lost identity, but here it is various non-Ethiopian lands and peoples (even Greeks) who present obstacles to the restoration of identity in Ethiopia. The über-Greek Theagenes even gives up his Greek identity to become an honorary Ethiopian. Kalasiris’ career partially mirrors that of Odysseus, each man being a problematical trickster whose failings have damaged his homeland and family and whose wanderings and struggles furnish a kind of redemption, indicated by the peaceful death surrounded by their family both men enjoy. Kalasiris also recalls Oedipus, who self-exiles due to sexual scandal, but here he prevents his sons’ mutual slaughter. He also recalls Oedipus at Colonus, who fnally grasps his notable place in the divine plan. History transformed and alternative history I have mentioned Aristotle’s statement that poetry (and, by extension, fction) was more philosophic than mere history, as well as Porter’s notion that a carefully crafted memory of the past and contemplation of its relics

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could furnish an encounter with the sublime. To the extent our ideal novels can be imaginatively experienced as history, they offer a space for an idealized history that might have been and might yet be. Clearly, there was a spectrum of approaches to historiography, from a nearly modern respect for hard facts and reasoning from those facts to history as another form of (melo)dramatic entertainment.67 Further, note that Jacoby, when outlining the theoretical framework for his collection of historiographical fragments, argued that the collection should include “virtually all forms of nonfction prose writing, not just what we should narrowly call history, but also mythography, ethnography, chronography, biography, literary history and geography” (“Über” 80–123). For Veyne, much of Greek history-writing is not about recovering precise facts, but about creating a plausible story,68 and our erotic novels often have enough verisimilitude to achieve this task. Long ago Schwartz posited that the Greek novel arose from Hellenistic dramatic history (Fünf Vorträge). Consider how much solid historical information was known about Alexander the Great, yet within a few centuries Alexander’s mythos would gain adventures that surpass those of most Greek mythological fgures. Consider, too, the Cyropaedia of Xenophon of Athens, which radically rewrites Cyrus’ life and career to provide an example of ideal government.69 As the Greek novelists rewrote mythic narratives to give happier outcomes to erotic love affairs, some novelists (e.g., Chariton, Heliodorus and the authors of the Metiochus or Ninus romances) created a type of alternative historical narrative which not only depicted a moment of ideal amatory achievement, but sometimes a moment of political and social superiority. I will show that Chariton’s Callirhoe is set in a known historical period with some historically real (or realistic) characters and situations, although major errors occur; such detail and Chariton’s occasional historiographical pose make Callirhoe the most ftting candidate as a positive alternate history illustrating potentials in the Greek past that could be activated in Chariton’s present. In contrast, the more comic and sardonic novels of Apuleius (whose Lucius idealizes Roman power) and Achilles Tatius seem set in the present or near past, and function not to give examples of utopian potential, but more to mock the insuffciencies of the current era.

Ideology, the political unconscious, the not-yet and the inescapable ideal: Fredric Jameson and Ernst Bloch Marxist-oriented criticism is a productive system for explicating the historical, political or social dimensions of artistic works.70 While some Marxist critics see cultural productions as mere refections of the underlying economic reality or class structure manifesting various forms of “false consciousness,” later versions recognize a more complex relationship between economic base and cultural superstructure, giving a certain autonomy to these cultural productions, even allowing prefgurations of a superior society. That our protagonists are aristocrats of the highest order, embodied in

Theoretical background 39 their great physical beauty and other excellent qualities, and are objects of divine concern ideologically aligns with the aristocrats’ view of themselves as being more deserving of rule and its privileges. Gordon (206), utilizing Weber,71 describes how Greco-Roman religion produces an obscuring “veil of power” to make unequal power relations and aristocratic supremacy seem natural. Further, as Swain (Hellenism) and Perkins (Suffering Self ) point out (and as Plutarch’s Moralia also plainly illustrate), marriage and family in this era had gained increased importance as proof of a signifcant social identity; similarly, in the novels of Chariton, Longus, Heliodorus and Apuleius, the protagonists’ marriage (or, in Lucius’ case, the fnal erotic settlement) brings benefts to the wider community. Fredric Jameson Fredric Jameson, a major Anglo-American scholar of Marxist theory,72 is a Hegelian Marxist whose wide-ranging studies have synthesized varied critical approaches, especially postmodernism. Some critics assert that Jameson’s Hegelian and idealizing tendencies have created a tooaccommodating theoretical construct and that he often slights the role of authorial subjectivity or the force of simple social and literary conventions or politics (Homer 63–64, citing Ahmad 3–4), preferring more impersonal and structural explanations. Critics also observe that Jameson passes over gender issues and overemphasizes the subversive latent signifcances of a text at the expense of more conventional readings (Eagleton 57–87; Goldstein 146–60; Homer 173–88). Nevertheless, Jameson’s critical methods can be proftably utilized to study ideal themes, especially for explicating historical, social and ideological dimensions, without accepting Jameson’s entire methodology (Rose, Sons). For Jameson, literature is a “socially symbolic act” that refects the various social and ideological structures and means of production within a given society (Political Unconscious). Jameson, via Lacan, uses Freud’s concepts of the “unconscious” and “repression,” considering texts as items that must be approached by the critic as a psychologist approaches the symptoms of a patient.73 Just as a psychologist might speak of the “surface” versus “unconscious” or “latent” meaning of a dream, a critic can refer to a text’s surface and latent meanings. As in dreams, repressed items may only appear in puzzling gaps and silences, odd transpositions, obsessions and other details. This latent meaning Jameson designates as the work’s political unconscious.74 Thus to consider a text’s full political dimensions, it is necessary to consider not only the political world the author creates through the surface narrative and its implied meanings, but also those signifcations (such as traces of existing oppositional groups)75 manifested within contradictions, discontinuities, silences,76 marginal scenes or in other disguised forms. Through such discourses, a dominant social class can justify its existence, or co-op the more revolutionary messages of other artistic productions

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(e.g., folktale) to serve their purposes. As novels by Balzac (although with more precise detail) contain groups and individuals who represent (sometimes allegorically) different forces and classes in French history (Jameson, Political Unconscious 151–84), so, for example, in Chariton and Heliodorus, different individuals and groups can be connected with historical classes and fgures—some idealized. Thus, Chariton presents an idealized image of a historically real Syracuse, as well as a Persia, whose interactions with subject Greeks recall Roman practices. But the plot’s incongruities, such as Chaereas’ complete abandonment of his crusade against Persia, and the peace Chaereas makes with the Great King point to the conficted attitudes of many Greeks of Chariton’s class in their relations with Rome (Alvares, “Some Political and Ideological Dimensions” 113–44). Robber bands fgure prominently in Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus and Apuleius, two of whose leaders (Hippothoos and Thyamis) become the protagonists’ friends. In fact, the “good bandit” (Hobsbawn) is exactly that sort of complex, structurally mediating fgure that expresses an awareness of social contradictions. Jameson (Political Unconscious 58–61) stresses historical and dialectical, or “stereoscopic,” thinking about virtually all cultural and historical matters (Roberts, Fredric 23). Here mediations are critical (Mohanty 101; Roberts, Fredric 76–82). For Jameson, narrative is a vitally important mediator, providing frameworks wherein the individual can deal with a world fragmented or nonsensical to immediate experience. For example, an individual is given a meaningful connection with a custom that makes no rational sense (such as drinking silently apart during the Athenian Choes) through the mediation of a charter myth (Malinowski). Those ideal narrative patterns, characters and symbols previously mentioned form part of this mediational process and serve as vehicles for ideology, creating images of the world and its workings compatible with social formations whose members receive and transmit narratives employing these archetypes. For a fully dialectical analysis, Jameson considers three phases of interpretation, each with a wider social and historical horizon. The frst phase considers the text as a mediation between the individual and a specifc historical and social situation (Jameson, Political Unconscious 79–83). His understanding of literary works resembles Lévi-Strauss’ conception of myth, both being spaces in which resolutions are constructed impossible in the real world,77 where life is made to appear whole and comprehensible. Thus consistent with Bloch’s notion of the “utopian surplus”78 of meaning, imaginative works often reproduce concrete social tensions and contradictions, which are then imaginatively harmonized through ideal elements, usually to the advantage of the socially dominant class, but which sometimes reveal possible solutions grounded in the concrete social practice and potentials of the author’s society.79 Accordingly, in Callirhoe Syracuse’s leading man Hermocrates and Chaereas’ father Ariston are deadly rivals (1.1.3), yet through the operations of Eros the demagogue their rivalry is eliminated (1.1.11–13). Chariton provides images of familiar concerns that are then

Theoretical background 41 managed and defused by the ideal vision—while also transmitting a somewhat reactionary political vision. In Jameson’s second level of interpretation, the artistic work belongs to a larger interaction, the ideological and social struggle between social formations (Jameson, Political Unconscious 76 and 83–93). A literary text presents a complex signifying structure expressing a number of social formations and processes, some semiautonomous, some more directly linked to political and economic realities (Roberts, Fredric 30–31; Jameson, Political Unconscious 32–38). Every existent culture possesses a mix of social formations and means of production, abiding together in structural coexistence, as well as ideological apparatus created in prior epochs now modifed for new uses (Jameson, Political Unconscious 94–98); some recall a past time (the British royal family), some represent current dominant modes (multinational corporations) and some the seed of a future society (tribal internet cultures). Artistic works refect their creators’ experience of these formations in surface and latent content.80 I show how the novels of Chariton and Heliodorus present a survey of civilizations, such as primitive (or anarchic) robber bands, the prelapsarian pastoral world, the heroic and Classical Dorian world and its independent city-states, sophistic and irregular Athens, Ionia, compliant with the dominant power, the vast power state (Persia as Rome) and the idealized state (Meroe, Lucius’ vision of Rome). Edith Hall described Apuleius’ Lucius as “an ass with double vision,” because, while Lucius lives the degraded, dangerous life of ass as slave,81 the notion that slavery itself is evil never occurs to him. There was a sense that slave status could taint one forever,82 and thus, the endurance of slavery is one of the main tests of the protagonists. Chariton and Longus present moments when the protagonists come to understand what it means to be a slave, or reveal their willingness to abuse slaves. Longus’ double-mindedness will be particularly evident as he idealizes (somewhat condescendingly) the pastoral lives of rustics who are either slaves or near-slaves, while also displaying the predatory control the city has over the countryside. Jameson’s third phase of criticism looks from the longer perspective of cultural revolution,83 wherein various means of production, social formations and ideologies create new patterns of interrelation, with new modes becoming dominant, others passing away or becoming vestigial. Since the text is an expression of this historical process, its full meaning can only be gained in relation to what came before and what comes after. These last two phases allow us to conceive of the text as a partial voice of a historical period and of a dynamic historical process; consider how Swain and others understand the Second Sophistic as an ideological tool elite Greeks (and non-Greeks) used to negotiate evolving power relationships with Rome, with the lower classes and other elite Greeks. Jameson emphasizes an idealizing and utopianizing impulse within all artistic productions, and views the Marxist vision of history as essentially a romantic or comic one (Roberts, Fredric 106–10; Goldstein 149–51). Jameson is sympathetic to Frye’s notion of our myths, tales and literary works being

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“all syllables and broken fragments of some single immense story” (Jameson, Political Unconscious 105), seeing them as a master-narrative to history and thus to culture, the “collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from the realm of Necessity.”84 Jameson allows for a positive hermeneutics,85 a notion derived from Christian hermeneutics via Paul Ricoeur and Ernst Bloch, which locates in past discourses an insistent utopian longing, the preconditions for true utopia. Further, ideology often creates consent by using elements of utopian longing (the fulfllment of desire, of the need for respect, for unity etc.) as a justifcation and reward (Jameson, “Reifcation” 142). Like Marcuse (and unlike Marx), Jameson believes that, due to the immense totalizing pressures of late capitalist society, utopian thinking must be promoted to keep alive the sense of the possibility of radical improvement, of a world different in nature as well as in degree. Artistic productions, such as the Greek ideal novel, have a role to play in this process. Ernst Bloch: the inescapable utopian dimension My own utopian thinking (and this book) has been inspired by Ernst Bloch, the twentieth century’s most dedicated philosopher of utopia.86 His version of Marxism is complex, speculative, more visionary than systematic and often prophetic (Geoghegan 44–45). His work sets the ideal elements of romance in the context of a wider history of humanity’s imagining of a better world and how such a world comes into being. Bloch’s three-volume The Principle of Hope details a vast range of utopian images and practices, ranging from daydreams and fairy tales to productions of popular culture87 and to the most elaborate utopian programs, underscoring how persistent is our dream of a fulflling human society, that hope for “something better,” haunting all types of cultural production—all part of humanity’s drive toward utopia. Bloch recognized, especially in his critique of German Fascism,88 the energy for social transformation that existed in the ideal images (homeland, social unity, “rootedness in the soil” etc.) which the Nazis utilized, while their opposition ignored these popular longings. Ideology does more than simply create mystifcation and false consciousness; even strongly ideological narratives contain a “surplus” of ideal and utopian content not reducible to pure ideology.89 Cultural production often presents a form of persuasive rhetoric that makes the status quo seem right and natural (Rose, Sons 29–33). For Bloch, the key to progress is the docta spes, the educated hope that mediates between reason and passion (Levitas 70), a hope linked to the anticipatory consciousness that “perceives the unrealized emancipatory potential in the past, the latencies and tendencies of the present, and the realizable hopes for the future” (Kellner 81–85). While for Bloch, Classical philosophy and religion lacked a true docta spes because they focused on a perfection mostly located in the past or outside the world, unable to see the potential in humanity’s future—the manner in which the past, ideal realms and the present interpenetrate in Classical philosophy, religion and

Theoretical background 43 myth could indeed allow a proper docta spes, at least in the imagination (Muguerza 127). Due to this utopian surplus, an author can create works that serve the interests of the dominant classes, but in doing so, he or she may provide concepts that can be used by others to guide their own liberation; for example, the eighteenth-century doctrine of the Rights of Man (mostly white male property owners) was a conceptual tool used by African-Americans (e.g., Frederick Douglass) and women for their own emancipation.90 Like Jameson, Bloch called for a positive hermeneutic that uncovers and resurrects lost dreams and unfulflled possibilities within our cultural productions and history (Kaufmann 39; Kellner 84). Like Frye, Bloch sees our fundamental and unfulflled desires as creating a sort of preconciousness of what we want, history being a “. . . repository of possibilities of living options for future action; therefore, what could have been can still be” (Kellner 81). Bloch’s theory of “non-contemporaneity” (Ungleichzeitigkeit) stresses the simultaneous existence of groups that refect prior modes of production or historical conditions (Hudson 43; Geoghegan 39). These non-contemporary strata provide vital sources of ideal themes that can be exploited for ideological purposes. For example, during the high Roman Empire, Greek farmers and shepherds still maintained earlier forms of economic and social life. The efforts of elite Greeks to maintain connection with these survivals, even to the point of imaginative communion with them,91 demonstrate how these survivals were a source of images of a superior society with better relations between classes and with nature, a theme important for D & C. Consider, too, the stress on these institutions as living entities whose archaic structures can provide an image of a still-living alternative to the present and even a critique of that present. Bloch also stressed the need to fnd utopia potential in the now, including in the unfulflled potential of existing social formations. This aspect is found in Chariton’s depiction of the nearly ideal city-state of Syracuse that implies undeveloped potentials even in the citystate governments still existing, if only pro forma, in the Roman-dominated Greek world.92 More controversial is Bloch’s speculative thought, a form of process philosophy (Hudson 68–158). His mysticism is particularly evident in his insistence that the deep longings of the inner self, no matter how apparently unrealizable (such as total sensual satisfaction), as revealed in our daydreams and imaginative artistic productions, somehow point toward a possible utopian future. Bloch, especially in his early writings, put great value in apocalyptic, eschatological and messianic visions as a prefguration of utopia.93 Bloch rationalizes these ideal formulations by stressing the uncompleted nature of the universe, human society and history, and that both the human personality and inert matter have radically undeveloped potentials and even an inner drive toward utopia (Principle 1:214–15; Kaufmann 37). Bloch’s Not Yet (Noch-nicht) asserts that the full utopian dimension of the present moment is hidden in the future (Hudson 19–22). Human beings have a central role in making the universe what it will become, being

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able, somehow, to intuit what will be possible, and even to act “as if” these goals were already able to be realized. Thus, art (and our novels) is seen as a “laboratory and a feast of implemented possibilities” (Bloch, Principle 1:216; Muguerza 127). Bloch sees in Kant’s categorical imperative to never treat a human as a means, but always as an end, a fgure for the perfect end of history, where the individual and the object/purpose/teleology of history will be united. The ideal career of novelistic lover provides a fgure for that unity, where the subject (the lover) and object/purpose/teleology of the lover’s life (the complete fulfllment of love) are in harmony. Bloch, like other Freudo-Marxists (Kellner 87), recognized the dynamism that arises from the open-endedness of human desire and the fact that individuals are motivated by dreams of a better life in which basic appetites are satisfed.94 Much artistic depiction of the ideal concerns desire, not only desire for this or that, but the state of desire, of the ceaseless wanting characteristic of much of human history, which is displayed in Odysseus’ complaints about his belly or Chaplin’s Everyman eating massive sandwiches.95 At a more sublime level, Bloch saw humans as subjects always pursing an object equal to their ideal selves, rather like Goethe’s Faust (Hudson 36). And also like Frye, Bloch’s conception of the Ultimum, the fnal utopian condition, in addition to the usual Marxist goals of the classless society of unalienated labor, is one wherein nature itself is fundamentally changed, becoming a unifed, humanized nature from which humans are no longer alienated,96 a motif in D & C. Bloch did not view daydreams and imagination and their ideal productions as mainly immature failures to come to grips with reality. His work’s positive hermeneutic emphasizes artistic productions as a space where radical hope can express itself in concrete imaginings, a hope which should not be dismissed as always mere fantasy and wish-fulflling daydream.97 This search for a better world takes place frst in the imagination, which, for Bloch, is in some sense constitutive;98 our creative minds, working through the possibilities which the cosmos presents, can glimpse a “pre-appearance” (Vor-Schein) of potential solutions, if only in the form of a latency or tendency within the world.99 Bloch’s concept of the “objective real possibility” (das objektiv-real Mögliche) follows from an understanding of what becomes possible within the objective realities and equally objective tendencies in human life (including psychological and spiritual existence) and the material universe. The “objective real possibility” is tied to that part of reality that Bloch denotes the Front or Novum, that reality that comes into being on the bounds of the real.100 Finally, Bloch’s emphasis upon the undying power of desire and hope, for this writer, reveals why matters (sometimes!) seem to get better for us, despite ourselves.

Marriage, family life and idealization of women As noted, I agree with Schmeling (Xenophon 133) that our novels’ readership was sentimentally inclined, seeking an imaginative space wherein

Theoretical background 45 love is central to the universe, where satisfying, enduring erotic bonds are possible.101 Accordingly, in the novels of Chariton and Heliodorus102 the protagonists’ love is a major historical motivator and sometimes a vehicle through which the gods motivate a benefcent political evolution. This subsection presents my initial postulates and considers historical and cultural contexts regarding love relationships and, to a lesser extent, marriage and the family as preparation for a more detailed discussion in subsequent chapters. Much of this has been covered in prior scholarship, to which I refer the reader. To one who imagines love affairs as consisting of a series of complex and evolving psychologically rich interchanges involving personal growth, our novels will seem limited. All our novels view love as an irresistible divine force, but vary as to how much detail they provide as to the characters’ emotional and amatory development. For Plutarch (e.g., Conjug. 4), sexual passion is transitory, and most traditional cultures tended to think that true love and proper sexuality only develop after marriage.103 Our protagonists’ struggles are a fgure for that developmental period between “love at frst sight” and a substantial, proven relationship. An ideal aspect is that, while passionate love tended to be transgressive and has tragic consequences in classical Greek drama and epic, our novels provide happy endings conforming (eventually) to the demands of respectable society. While depictions of romantic love go back to Homer, among the classical Greeks, romantic love was generally suspect and hardly thought a sound basis for marriage; issues of fnances, family alliances and status were more important, and the majority of elite marriages were arranged.104 This negativity is also observed in Latin love elegy. While in Greek myth great beauty tends to be bound up with disaster (e.g., Pandora and Helen), exceptional female beauty in our novels is also linked to examples of outstanding chastity and morality (Heiserman, “Aphrodisian Chastity”), as epitomized by Callirhoe, likened to Aphrodite the Maiden (Charit. 1.1.1). Similarly, Apuleius’ Psyche is compared to a virginal Venus (Met. 4.29). The novels’ protagonists marry persons they have fallen in love with and personally chosen. The Greek ideal novels show considerable equality (especially for that era) between the love relationship of the male and female protagonists.105 Erotic desire and sex are often shown in very positive terms, although the evil and tragic products of warped erotic desire are also vividly depicted. While the Greek elite male was usually much older than his bride, our couples are close to the same age and usually share a lack of sexual experience.106 They demonstrate equal desire and give themselves willingly to each other. The hero does not aggressively impose his love on the heroine; indeed, to some critics, the novels are transgressive in how their rather passive male protagonists are debilitated and nearly feminized by their erotic desires.107 Only Kleitophon tries a more aggressive strategy of seduction, and he pays dearly for it. The love plot of Greek New Comedy was a formative infuence,108 and it presented young men marrying for love and even being morally improved as they were compelled to correct their acts of resistance to parental or social authority

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or even a reckless act of rape (Wiles 34–36). New Comedy allowed a certain amount of mutual desire, providing the female protagonist is a neophyte courtesan and the male protagonist her frst lover. In Roman love elegy, there some mutual love appears, but under problematical circumstances; the poet’s mistress is fckle and mercenary, and the poet cannot marry her (Konstan 142–59). In contrast, the heroine of the Greek novels is often socially superior to the hero, capable of more assertive, even transgressive, action and possessing a true personality in her own right; she can express and even act upon her romantic desire. Our novels have little interest in describing the mundane struggles and triumphs of later married family life. The true adventure of the ideal novels is the protagonists’ struggle to remain faithful amid the world’s temptations and assaults. In accord with the structures of the quest/initiation ritual/ rite-of-passage pattern, the perils and temptations encountered, despite lapses,109 prove the couple’s steadfast loyalty, devotion and sympathy, and these, presumably, will overcome future threats. Accordingly, in Callirhoe, the couple marries and begins their separate adventures soon after and have little contact until the last chapter. Although Heliodorus’ Charikleia and, to a lesser extent, Theagenes, more self-consciously regulate their passions according to that epoch’s views on spirituality, their passions still burn bright, which can prompt a correspondingly dark despair. The scenes in which Charikleia makes Theagenes swear to respect her virginity, the oaths of loyalty they declare in prison, their debates as they ponder future uncertainties—all evidence a more complex emotional interchange as the two help each other negotiate transitions to new identities. But many features of the novels’ depiction of the status and behavior of women, marriage, family life and personal relationships undercut these ideal elements.110 Yet considering the cultural constraints of that period, these novels show meaningful elements of a more humane (or at least modern and Western) conception of marriage and gender relations. As with the depiction of political, material, geographical and historical realities, our romantic novels, to varying degrees, mix recognizable realia from private life with ideal and mythic elements. Such matters as the importance of a successful marriage for women, dowries, abortion, child exposure, parental rights over children, arranged marriages, problems with stepparents, legal concubinage, prostitution, adultery, divorce, the sexual exploitation of slaves, the power of fathers and the marginalization of mothers, the social importance of a family’s reputation and so forth—all have their correlates in the lived experience of the novel’s readers, serving as a “rhetorical echo chamber” for concrete anxieties and fears surrounding marriage and family. Our novels clearly make marriage (or restoration of a marriage) the couple’s goal; even otherwise base antagonists (Pelorus, Kyno and Trachinus) desire to marry (Liviabella Furiani and Scarcella 278; Haynes 156–57). The ideal is heterosexual; while homosexual relations are presented as acceptable, they tend to end in tragedy.111 The Greco-Roman novels present far less explicit

Theoretical background 47 engagement with issues of the wider social obligations of marriage than found even in New Comedy, much less in Plutarch (Haynes 157). As noted, the Greek elite engaged in an intense, competitive, mutual inspection, with a strong focus on their families’ ancestry. Accordingly, one’s self-control, especially regarding sexual behavior and family, was long seen as an indicator of ftness to rule. Isocrates (3.40–41) represents Nicocles, King of Cyprus, as asserting that proper monarchs must preserve homonoia in their households as well as in the state (Walcot 25–26). The Progymnasmata of Aphthonius of Antioch made marriage a training ground and impetus to action for the husband (Cooper 94–95). In On Anger, Plutarch declares that the self-control one must exert in the household in dealing with wives and slaves is good practice for action in the public sphere.112 Episodes from history and biography (e.g., Antony and Cleopatra) narrate unsavory domestic relations connected with political disaster. Ever since the Hellenistic period, matters of marriage, women and family had been increasingly used in imperial propaganda and were prominent among the Caesars. These concerns about marriage and family appear in many authors, on coins and in Greco-Roman funeral inscriptions.113 Marriage could symbolize important themes of dynastic continuity and the values of concordia/homonoia (Brown 16; Lefkowitz 61; Haynes 161). The link between homonoia and proper rule can be observed as early as in Homer’s Odyssey, where Ithaka’s restoration is linked to the reunion of the like-minded Odysseus and Penelope. Marriages among the imperial nobility and high elite were prominent public occasions; accordingly, in our novels crowds often participate in public celebrations of the couple’s union.114 Part of the dramatic tension of our novels is linked to how sometimes protagonists draw dangerously close to (or even cross over) the line with behavior indicative of the akolastoi, although, in the end, they become respectable members of their communities. In this era, more “reciprocal” and even “companionate” conceptions of marriage become more visible, along with an increased emphasis on love as necessary for marriage, although elements of such attitudes occur in Homer, Plato,115 Xenophon of Athens and Greek New Comedy (Goessler 114; Hawley 118–19). Tragedians such as Sophocles and the philosopher Plato, mostly in the context of male–male relationships, had demonstrated an awareness of the ethical dimensions of eros, especially as an impetus to greater nobility of character (Nussbaum, “Erōs” 55–86). A greater valuation of women and erotic relationships appears in Neopythagorean and Stoic philosophers, such as Musonius Rufus and particularly in Plutarch’s Eroticus, Advice to the Bride and Groom and Consolation to His Wife,116 works central to Foucault’s thesis that during the later Roman Empire there was a greater elite emphasis on the control of the elite’s emotional and sexual selves (Swain, “Plutarch’s Moral Program” 89; Stadter, “Subject” 222). Yet, for all that, note how aristocratic epithalamia suggest that the bridegroom be willing to endure his resisting bride’s scratches in what amounts to the rape of a woman who seems to hate him.117

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Plutarch Plutarch’s extensive and infuential writings straddle the worlds of Rome, Greece, politics, religion and civic life, combining philosophy with popular morality and practical sense (Harries 184). Although how favorable Plutarch’s attitudes to women really are is questionable (Wohl; Nikolaidis, “Plutarch on Women” 27–28), he puts surprising value on marriage’s emotional aspects, on the husband’s need to be sensitive to the wife’s feelings, on the couple’s shared moral and intellectual life (Tsouvala 4). Both Plutarch and the Greek novels are concerned with how passionate love is transformed into something more spiritual and substantial (e.g., Conjug. 4; Di Meo 100–01).118 In Plato’s Phaedrus proper philosophic love creates a harmonious and friendly relationship wherein both partners can gain world-transcending knowledge. Similarly, in Plutarch, the proper life aimed at philosophical and spiritual improvement and the union of husband and wife, due to the necessary actions each must undertake and the benefts each receives, creates conditions for such improvement, what Goessler calls a “spiritual symbiosis.” Further, since private and public life are one continuum of moral practice, the homonoia in marriage and that of the city are linked (Swain, “Plutarch’s Moral Program” 88–89). Recall how Homer’s Odysseus and Penelope are notably “like-minded.” Musonius had described a marriage as similar to oxen pulling the same yoke, a “breathing together,” although, since ultimately the wife’s primary obligation is to serve the husband, Musonius’ feminism is “incomplete.”119 Even St. Paul advocates a reciprocity wherein the wife rules the husband’s body and the husband the wife’s body (1 Cor. 7:3-4). Likewise, Plutarch depicts the proper marriage as a harmonious blending of lives, although the husband creates the basic form of that communal life, just as a mixture of wine and water, although mostly water, is still called “wine” (Conjug. 20). Yet the husband should rule “sharing her [the wife’s] feelings and growing together with her in affection” (Conjug. 33). Again, the gentleness and sympathy of the husband’s rule are stressed, and the need to use reason and persuasion rather than force (see Dedication to Plut. Conjug. [138 c-d]; Stafford; Di Meo 104). Although some comments support the traditional double standard, Plutarch believes that the husband should conduct himself by the same standards of faithfulness as the wife.120 In the Republic, Plato imagined female Guardians, and Zeno of Citium admitted female philosophers to his ideal state; later, Musonius Rufus believed daughters and wives should be granted a limited philosophical education, so they might better perform traditional female roles and suggested that paideia makes a woman more manly.121 Plutarch likewise admits, within limits, that women can (and should) learn philosophy, and that women have an equal claim to virtue as do men (De mul. vir. 242f). Indeed, both Pollianus and Eurydice, to whom the Advice to the Bride and Groom is dedicated, are Plutarch’s pupils, and Clea, the dedicatee of Isis and Osiris and On the Virtues of Woman, is probably her mother (Pomeroy, “Refections”  34–35;

Theoretical background 49 Nikolaidis, “Plutarch on Women” 31–32). Plutarch describes women demonstrating great courage while supporting their families, husbands (even post mortem!), cities and defending their virtues against tyrants and reprobates, especially Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi; Kratesikleia, mother of Cleomenes of Sparta; Camma, a Galatian woman; and even the unnamed wife of Panteus, former lover of Kleomenes.122 Plutarch gives numerous examples of how women provide strong encouragement for men to perform properly (Foxhall 147–48; Stadter, “Philosophos” 173–82). The Stoic Seneca likewise listed exemplars of female courage, particularly Lucretia (Cons. Marc. 16; Dressler 162). In the Eroticus (754d), Plutarch implies that, in some cases, a wife might best rule the husband, allowing the widow Ismenodora to abduct a young man for marriage. However, such female initiative is palatable only if a proper male actor is lacking, and the woman is not acting primarily in her own interests. Plutarch, occasionally appalled by the license and public activity of elite woman of his day, appears to wish to return women to the circumscribed behavior of a Timothea or Claudia Quinta (Pomeroy, “Refections” 40). In fact, Wohl would deny that Plutarch demonstrates any “valorization” of the wife as a unique, independent moral agent with subjectivities which he must respect (171–91); instead, Plutarch’s martial homonoia is achieved through the wife submerging her desires and even identity in those of the husband. Plutarch declares that the husband should control the wife the way the soul controls the body (Conjug. 33). Further, a wife should have no feelings of her own (14), although Plutarch also declares a husband must make every effort to share his wife’s feelings (33). Thus, where the husband of Classical Greece was content to control his wife’s external social behavior, Plutarch’s husband must mold his wife as spirit molds recalcitrant matter, subjugating her interior life as well. It is a mark of the husband’s spiritual and philosophic power that he can achieve this, and the eyes of the community are ever watchful.123 Plutarch (like Augustine later) treats the female body as matter prone to sensuality and moral lapse, having philokosmia and being philoploutos, which must be forced to adopt virtues alien to it. Accordingly, Plutarch suggests that the woman’s education should be closely monitored by the husband, lest she gets odd ideas, which he compares to abnormal womb growths (Conjug. 48).124 Governed by philosophically tinged reason, the couple will dwell in homonoia, but one which renders the woman more, not less, useful for the normal patriarchal and social hierarchies and traditional female duties. Unlike several Stoics,125 Plutarch does not see the begetting of children as the chief justifcation for marriage, which is the chief reason animals come together, with marriage merely for sex or for economic reasons being a cohabitation, not a shared life (Conjug. 34; Goessler 110; Jazdzewska 85). While many Roman-era authors accepted amatory pleasure in marriage, there was still a suspicion, even rejection of it, especially among the Epicureans, one also seen in Plutarch.126 In contrast, Chrysippus had argued that eros is not an irrational force, but springs out of philia.127 Plutarch does not completely

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despise sexual pleasure or restrict it to reproductive needs; indeed, sexual activity is the “physical basis for the emotional and psychological ties of affection (philia) and mutual concord (homonoia)” (Goessler 112), which can create a unifying bond between the couple (Stadter, “Subject” 229). Plutarch suggests that lovemaking should be applied to dissolve quarrels (Conjug. 38). However, an excessive concentration on pleasure makes the man thoughtless and undisciplined (15 and 17), threatening grave social consequences. Plutarch seeks to transform marital lovemaking into a philosophical and spiritual experience. Not only heterosexual sex can go beyond the satisfaction of urges and the need to reproduce, it can also encourage philia (Amat. 759e) and promote that Platonic ascent to ideal beauty normally associated with homosexual love. Plutarch’s wife, by offering pleasurable sexual activity, but somehow in an orderly, but not too “buttoned down” fashion, becomes a spur to her husband’s virtue, the payoff for his hard labors at controlling himself and reforming her (Nikolaidis, “Plutarch on Women” 73–74). The husband, practicing philosophical and ethical askēsis, does to some extent erase the wife he educates and rules, but he can only do this well if he submits himself to the rule of an overmastering logos. The wife must “cultivate the art of handling her husband by charms of character and daily life, training him in good ways with pleasure” (Plut. Conjug. 29; my emphasis; also Wohl 183). By adjusting her moods to her husband (e.g., being calm when he is agitated [Conjug.37]), by supporting him in public and being willing to speak through him, Eurydice can to a certain extent rule Pollianus (McNamara 160). Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris presents a model of the universe wherein the female principle, representing unperfected matter, is active in her love for the male, who embodies the Good, takes that Good into herself and then, through reproduction, spreads it out (Stadter, “Philosophos” 175–77). Plutarch does not insist on a purely rational system; for example, in De communibus notitiis adversus Stoicos, he denies the Stoic notion that an eros, which is a purely rational pursuit of philia without pathos for the beautiful person, is eros at all (Comm. not. 1073c); Plutarch is more of the opinion of the Socrates of the Phaedrus, who imagines a special type of erotic madness that moves the pair to wisdom and nobility (Nussbaum, “Erōs” 82–83). In the Advice to the Bride and Groom, Plutarch’s core beliefs in gentleness, humility, sympathy and marital partners working to avoid quarrels and bring reconciliation shine out.128 Plutarch doctrinally takes a hard line on male superiority and rule, yet also genuinely values women and encourages the future husband to develop a compassionate and sympathetic concern for his mate’s feelings; a similar confusion appears in our novels. While the Advice presents customary conservative opinions, the novelistic Eroticus (Amatorius) presents a triumph of apparently transgressive love, which the young Plutarch defends and which the people of Thespiae, and even the arch-misogynist Pisias, end up agreeing with (Harries 190– 91). As noted, Plutarch is more focused on the problems of two married

Theoretical background 51 129

near-strangers attaining marital harmony, while our novels are rather uninterested in the protagonists’ married life. Rigorous endurance trials prove the protagonists’ fdelity, but do not create that fdelity; the protagonists’ own good natures, luck and divine interventions are responsible for that. For Plutarch, the wife’s character must be what truly attracts the good husband, which makes her more attractive than the hetaira and her allurements, and while the character of the romantic novel’s heroine is exemplary, this is not shown to be what especially attracts the hero, although the heroes, to differing degrees, come to appreciate the heroine’s virtue. While the ideal novels often mock overt philosophizing, they all imply the amatory relationship as a de facto venue for maturation and moral training, especially Longus and Heliodorus. The novels conform to Plutarch’s ideals in the considerable emotional interchange and mutual dependency of the couple, the appreciation of sexual love, and the equal standards of love and fdelity, although Plutarch acknowledges a far greater complexity and depth of feeling. Our novels make more of sensuality and even love of personal adornment and riches than Plutarch would have approved of, and likewise, Plutarch would have found the novels’ pronounced emotionalism self-indulgent, excessive and lacking the philosopher’s control of the passions. The female protagonists’ heroics do not really exceed what Plutarch gives examples of, but, nevertheless, our novels are far more equalitarian in spirit than Plutarch would have allowed. Unlike the situation Plutarch envisions, it is the novelistic hero who needs the greater reformation and who is more likely to betray the relationship. Similarly, it is the heroine, more than the hero, who is the moral center, though, somewhat similarly, the wife in Plutarch is also the moral barometer of the soundness of the household (Hawley 117). Plutarch stresses more strongly the connection between marriage and public life and its responsibilities than do the novels, although in works like Advice, this civic aspect fades into the background (Patterson 129). Perhaps most importantly, our novels suggest, as does Plutarch, that the potentially transgressive force of desire, through marriage, can become a beneft to the individual and society (Cooper 24). The idealized(?) heroine The novel’s idealized female protagonist embodies a fantasy of awe-inspiring beauty combined with loyal, almost selfess fdelity to their mates, being often the stand-in for Aphrodite and divine erotic power. In obtaining her, the protagonist recalls the paradigm of a young hero gaining a goddess for his mate. The heroine thus functions as a kind of divine force that raises young men above themselves. Women in the ideal Greek novels often show quite considerable courage, intelligence and ingenuity, and sometimes, among themselves, they provide an alternative model to the androcentric political order. But only Chariton’s novel, with its description of the conduct of the Persian elite women and Statira’s interactions with Callirhoe (5.9, 7.5, 7.6,

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8.3 and 8.4), really suggests such a community; instead, our ideal novels conform to Egger’s declaration that the novels, at the emotional level, are gynocentric, but otherwise androcentric (“Women” 272). As Elsom, Morales and others suggest, the novels present the heroine as an object to be displayed and desired,130 whose body is often threatened by sexual violence, sometimes exposed—all for the reader’s scopophilic pleasure. As with Roman elegy, there is a suspicion that the narrative is mainly concerned with the hero’s construction of his own self-image through relations with the suffering heroine. Gender roles and identifcation in our novels are complex and fuid, and notions of traditional masculine comportment are undercut, allowing the possibility of the male reader’s sympathy for and even partial identifcation with the heroine’s subjectivities and sufferings. In subsequent chapters, I discuss to what extent Callirhoe and Chloe are erased, their subjectivities and potentials being submerged by patriarchal and social forces. The novels both idealize archaic moral behaviors and exhibit contemporary concerns, and often they do not show women enjoying the liberties then possible.131 The authority of the Greek kurios had waned, and women (particularly in Egypt) were more able to carry out business in their own right.132 Evidence from the Greek East shows women holding offces and acting as public benefactors, although this could be more show than substance.133 Roman elite women were quite visible in public functions, and the infuence of the women of the imperial household, Severan woman especially, is familiar.134 Some women in early Christian communities wielded exceptional power often connected to their chastity. However, such depictions of female freedom and power are relatively rare in the Greek novels, at least when the heroines are still in their native cities. Our heroines remain confned within patriarchal and social conventions, subordinated to the male hierarchy and used as transferable tokens within the system of male-oriented power relations (Elsom 212–30; Egger, Women 291–99), and what freedom they enjoy is compromised. The novel’s heroines read and write with ease and demonstrate considerable learning, especially Leukippe and Charikleia. As was becoming commoner even among Greeks, Leukippe attends symposia,135 and (perhaps due to her status as priestess) Charikleia is a familiar sight at Delphi. But the heroine appears generally quite isolated, even in her native city, as compared to the male protagonist. She has few or no real friends or confdants, and those she has tend to be of servile status, and, as in the case of Chariton’s Plangon, are not completely trustworthy. More often relationships between women are hostile; the strong friendship between Callirhoe and the Persian women is exceptional.136 Males have a much broader range of friends and occupations, women a far more limited selection (Egger, Women 95–96). Heroines are often sequestered or embarrassed at going out in public without escorts, even in foreign lands; paradoxically, when reduced to slavery, they enjoy greater freedom,137 although women outside the home appear under the constant threat from rape and other sexual violence, and they need a male protector—who sometimes,

Theoretical background 53 like Charmides and Chaereas in L & K, becomes a predator. Their most direct employment of power comes through their cunning; our novels rarely show them engaged in major, non-romantic occupations. For example, after their marriage, Callirhoe apparently has nothing to do at home but sit, cry and wait for Chaereas. The exception, of course, is Chloe, being a peasant girl, not an aristocrat (Egger, Women 305–19). Yet the extant novels do not portray the heroine as solidly trapped under her husband’s explicit domination either. Chaereas and Theagenes in particular respect the heroine’s plans, and no protagonist outright dismisses the heroine’s opinions or tells her to defer to the masculine world, as, for example, the suddenly maturing Telemachus does to Penelope (Hom. Od. 1.345–60). In Callihroe, where this domination is most evident, Chaereas pays harshly for such behavior. In D & C, after he has learned of sex, Daphnis seems to take a more dominant role as he assumes the role of the teacher regarding Echo (Hunter, “Longus and Plato” 20–21), but subsequent events do not (pace Winkler, Constraints 101–26) completely subvert their equality, as I detail later. Heliodorus’ Theagenes even gives up his homeland for Charikleia. The heroines, especially outside their homelands, show considerable initiative, cunning, inventiveness, which gives them some effective power, at times seeming to surpass their male counterparts. In Asia Minor, Callirhoe, with Hermocrates absent, gives herself to Dionysius through autoekdosis (Charit. 5.8.1 ff) as Melite gives herself to Kleitophon and Anthia to Perilaos (2.1.3); note that these unions all fail. The heroine’s more mature thinking can save the day (8.2.4) and keep the relationship together (Haynes 45–80; Egger, Women 175–82). Note how, when they return to Syracuse, Callirhoe is displayed beside Chaereas like a Hellenistic general and his consort, but, once they dock, Callirhoe rushes inside the temple to be alone with Aphrodite’s statue, while Chaereas conducts the public business. Family life As noted, our novels give little detail about how ideal family life would work. Thus in Heliodorus’ and Achilles Tatius’ novels, the marriage occurs at the conclusion, and Achilles Tatius’ opening scene makes one wonder if the couple are still together. Xenophon of Ephesus, while detailing the couple’s wedding night (1.9), soon has them sent out on their journeys, and, once they are reunited, his novel ends with a bland declaration that their subsequent life was one long festival (5.15). The last lines of the Apollonius King of Tyre give only slightly more detail about the couple’s subsequent untroubled life and death. Chariton’s novel more vividly shows the problems of married life; after the wedding, Chaereas demonstrates more typical male attitudes and actions; the newly married Callirhoe is sequestered, while Chaereas goes out (1.3.2), and Callirhoe hints at his former lovers (1.3.6). Later, due to his jealousy and lack of trust, Chaereas is tricked into believing Callirhoe being unfaithful and kicks her into a coma.138 This novel concludes with Callirhoe

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praying to Aphrodite that she never be separated from Chaereas again, suggesting her fear of the future. Longus grants a more substantial view of the couple’s later life, who will continue to live a semi-pastoral life and have their children suckled by animals as they once were (4.39). Perhaps the fnest (if post eventum) view of married life exists in the story of the fsherman Aegialeus and his mummifed wife Thelxinoe in Xenophon of Ephesus (5.1). But no substantial details are given beyond the fact that their mutual presence was a consolation for abject poverty. The Aegialeus episode embodies the fantasy that frst love can retain its intensity forever, not how precisely it might grow into something more substantial. The protagonists’ amatory relationship contrasts with the repressions, compromises and torments of family life, and the novelists’ general inability to think in a more ideal fashion about the family reveals crucial limits for their utopian imaginings. Indeed, the protagonists’ marriage seems to be detached from the idea of “home” or from the usual social obligations (Haynes 157). While male paternal authority is generally supported, the protagonists’ mothers tend to be dead, absent or less visible than their fathers.139 Relations between fathers and sons are considerably better than between daughters and mothers, who are more negatively depicted, especially in their emotionalism, sometimes violent, which fts with traditionally misogynist views (Haynes 116–22). In line with folktale motifs, the protagonists’ parents often bring about their children’s suffering, tending to put social demands, reputation (especially regarding their daughter’s virginity) and patriarchal concerns above the happiness and even their children’s lives, often seen as a resource to be traded or used. Thus, the natural parents of Daphnis and Chloe expose their children without good reason; their subsequent slave- parents, although loving, keep a frm eye on their children’s fnancial potential; in Xenophon of Ephesus, Hyperanthes’ father in effect sells his son to an older man for sex; the parents of Aegialeus and Thelxinoe drive them to elope and into a life of permanent want; Manto’s husband cannot keep his eyes off Anthia (2.11); Polyidus’ wife Rhenaea rightly suspects her husband regarding Anthia and plots behind his back (5.1); Kyno, in lust for Habrocomes, kills her husband. Hippothoos marries an unattractive older woman for her money (5.9). In Apollonius King of Tyre, themes of incest dominate (Chiarini), and in Apuleius’ novel, of course, nearly all ties of marriage and family are brutally betrayed. And, the hagiographic romances, such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla and Pseudo-Clementine Romance, are likewise flled with troubled families. Gender issues As do genres like Roman elegy, our novels explicitly and implicitly undercut all rigid defnitions of masculinity and masculine roles.140 Admittedly at the conclusion of the novels the patriarchal political order and conventional

Theoretical background 55 values more or less remain in place; but, as in Plutarch’s Thespiae, in our novels Eros has compromised the confnes of the masculine order, and the erotic hero, even the most properly heroic of them, Chaereas, has been forced to submit to Eros in a most unmanly way. Notions of identity (especially sexual and social identity) are built out of contrasts: men vs. women, free vs. slave, city-dweller vs. rustic, well-behaved vs. dissolute, and moral vs. immoral. But, like the experience of war in Thucydides, the experience of intense love can confuse those polarities, with lawful marriage often requiring initial transgressive acts. Transcendence Plato’s Phaedrus details how intense feelings of desire and the joy of romantic love can produce intimations of the transcendent Good. Christianity and other faiths sanctioned marital loyalty and sexual restraint through making it part of god’s law and an act of devotion. But love itself is in our novels the presiding god, and the beloved—hero or heroine—is the interface through which love is experienced and interacts with the world. As Frye noted, the heroine’s struggle in particular (but also the hero’s) to protect chastity symbolizes a deep desire to preserve personal integrity against the world’s varied forms of violation. The hero’s unmasculine weakness due to eros is a strong proof of his love’s intensity; that intensity helps earn him his reward. Apuleius’ Metamorphoses vividly presents this theme, however ironized; Lucius fnds in Isis the perfect female who lifts him above the grossness of normal life, whom he has gained after a long time of confusion, wandering and suffering. Many romance readers, whose social environment demanded rigid standards of behavior and exacted harsh punishments, no doubt through the protagonists vicariously experienced the fantasy of acting transgressively and nevertheless succeeding. To sum, our ideal novels neither support a modern, “liberated” view of romantic relations nor simply reproduce the then-current oppressions of patriarchy. Patriarchal and social values, questioned, transgressed and even transformed, prevail, although with their authority exposed as incomplete and limited. The ideal of such emotional interdependency for the couple, of even partial equality in the relationship, of some subordination of male power to female sensibility, of making such concerns an object of profound moral attention and an avenue to personal improvement, having freedom to choose a mate, is an advance over Greco-Roman cultural norms. The “resisting reader” may refuse complacency before the oppressive “premises and protocols of the past”;141 but there are positive ways to resist. The implicit violence and oppression observed in our novels should be seen standing alongside another, more utopian vision which exists, in different ways, in all our ideal novels and which includes, among much else, a vision (or Blochian pre-appearance) of a better possible history of love and its productions.

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The ideal dimensions of the career of desire Our novels narrate the protagonists’ adventures, set in motion by desire, during which they often engage in transgressive emotions and even firt with antisocial behaviors—yet, in the end, are properly wed, integrated into society and even bring notable benefts to their homeland, presenting desire as motivating human action.142 Our engagements with varied desires illuminate the ideal, since the problematic of desire touches directly upon what a human life and self actually are, what the self’s drives may be, what constitutes its proper development and the possibilities of a satisfactory negotiation between the competing claims within the individual psyche and the demands of family, society and morality. Here I must focus on what pertains most to the ideal and the possibility of the ideal. Briefy, our novels’ portrayal of desires (among them erotic desire) show that they do not always lead to suffering and tragedy, but can educate, bring about needed expansions of personality, and even beneft the wider community—while also engaging the transgressive. All our novels narrate the protagonists’ career of desire and their engagements with various forms of desire. Romantic desire creates the couple’s initial union and generates the obstacles that bring about an enrichment of protagonists’ personalities, as they create a bond between themselves based on mutual trust, loyalty and devotion, which goes beyond sensuous attraction. Thus, Chaereas’ love for Callirhoe leads him to become a true leader and successor to Hermocrates (Alvares, “Chariton’s Erotic History” 613–29), and his sufferings produce a profound trust in Callirhoe, but little enrichment of personality beyond that, while Callirhoe more substantially uncovers the depths of her loyalty to Chaereas. Much more is learned and accomplished in the other ideal novels. There is a two-part educational trajectory: First, the couple’s falling in love and then the trials and further education that arise from that love. D & C interrogates under what conditions proper love can be learned. L & K and, to a lesser extent, the Aithiopika also show the protagonists learning about love’s nature. Thus, Daphnis must confront his inner Pan and various androcentric social norms. Kleitophon and Leukippe learn (albeit more loosely) loyalty and self-sacrifcing devotion to their partner and to a certain purity. Charikleia and Theagenes learn just how much they can endure for the other and how their love connects to the divine plan. And to some degree or other, most must learn in failure and transgression. Chaereas loses Callirhoe after his distrust leads him to kick her into a false death, enraging Aphrodite. The respectable Callirhoe evokes a Milesian tale of “a woman with two husbands.” Habrocomes gives in to Kyno; the recognized Daphnis seems briefy to forget Chloe, who is soon abducted by Lampis. Kleitophon’s willingness to confess to the supposed murder of Leukippe in part arises from deep guilt for the suffering he has caused her. Before Memphis, Theagenes, now Thyamis’ secondin-command of the rebel force, fails to recognize Charikleia and even hits

Theoretical background 57 her; later, the despairing Charikleia confesses to the murder of Kybele, being willing in death to abandon the still living and endangered Theagenes. The failures of Apuleius’ Lucius are too obvious to mention. Views of desire in the classical world One will not fnd in Greco-Roman literature the in-depth presentations of the pathologies of desire apparent in Dostoevsky, Huysmans or Lawrence, not to mention modern authors. The true distinction is not so much found in the outward manifestations of desire (Petronius, Apuleius, the writers of the Historia Augusta and, for that matter, Christian polemicists, give us much on that score) but rather in the more complex conceptions of the individual, the psychological and the aesthetic which have accompanied the rise of Western secular, individualist and consumerist culture. In the more “serious” genres of epic, tragedy and history, the results of strong desire are usually lugubrious or tragic. Even in the more forgiving genres of comedy and romance, desire often makes its victims become weaklings or act as fools. The desires themselves were generally presented as directed at specifc, identifable things such as erotic objects (woman, man or boy), ruling power, a material possession, a certain status or reputation and so forth. There are various myths of more or less concrete desires gone out of control, for example, the myth of Midas’ touch or the appetite of an Erysichthon. Desire and the passions were often conceived as divine or divinely sent (e.g., Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen) or of godlike and near irresistible power (e.g., Euripides’ Hippolytus and our novels). While early Plato seemed suspicious of all forms of desire, by the Laws he recognized that there were types of persons and periods of life when taking account of desire and non-philosophical pleasure was necessary for education.143 Until the Romantic period, the central philosophical and religious traditions of the West generally insisted upon the control of desire by reason. A deeper critique of both desire and reason begins with Gorgias, Euripides144 and Plato. As noted, in the very public culture of the Roman-era elite, the ability to assert self-control over desire was the defning characteristic of the aristocrat and one way in which males distinguished themselves from supposedly less self-controlled females.145 The control of desire was a well-known concern for Epicureanism and earlier Stoicism (Nussbaum, Therapy). Among early Christian sects, the ability not only to control desire (epitomized by the avowed virgin) but even to mortify the fesh became a means to assert moral superiority and gain power in relation to the status quo (Cooper). In medieval European poetry and literature, especially in the courtly love tradition, the persistent motif of adultery thematizes the tragic confict of passion and desire with the demands of society, social custom and morality. In our novels, the concept of sōphrosynē and being sōphrōn appears constantly. In the Classical world, character was fundamentally performative, although since Homer, the gap between inner and outer selves had been noted. Konstan correctly details

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how the authors of our novels distinguish between physical chastity and the more important inner sanctity, as did Christian writers. Physical virginity becomes a fgure for our individual original purity. Forced to choose between the life of her unborn child and a bigamous marriage, in wedding Dionysius Callirhoe has acted sōphrōn, being forced to make a necessary choice under impossible conditions. Charikleia will fnally understand how married sex and sōphrosynē are compatible. Habrocomes thinks, for an instant, that sōphrosynē has hurt more than helped him (Xen. Ephes. 3.12). Lycaenion proves a more useful sex-and-morality educator to Daphnis than Philetas. The divinely administered test Melite passes mocks conventions that focus on the letter rather than the spirit of the law of love.146 In these and many other matters, the novels show that true sōphrosynē is not prescriptive, save generally as involving loyalty to the beloved. The characters of the protagonists change as they learn to understand their capacity for loyalty and, more importantly, amid their confusing world, what true chastity might entail. Ballengee is certainly correct that “the body, as a locus of the eros which ignites the plot, actually indicates an essential concern of these early novels” (141). In Lacanian terms, the body, as a locus of desire, fear, anxiety and other feelings, preserves traces of the operations of the Real that characters in the novel, as do its readers, try to ft into the various symbolic systems (e.g., religion, philosophy and popular moralizing). This is especially shown when D & C’s protagonists try to make sense of their unfamiliar and dangerous erotic emotions. Philetas produces culture-bound logos that declare they are “in love,” but his defnitions are unsatisfactory. Kleitophon gives many exacting descriptions of emotional and mental states, forcing them into the logic of sententiae,147 which, in a world where things have multiple appearances and meanings altered by passions, becomes a vain exercise. Indeed, these emotions might render it impossible to form a coherent sense of one’s own personal identity and thus to properly perform a public identity. Therefore, a goal of the protagonists’ coming-of-age quest is to be able to perform adult status by containing these bodily impulses within socially approved thought systems and behaviors. Feminist criticism interrogates texts (like ours) written and mostly read by men, texts possessing numerous passages in which female beauty is enhanced by a woman’s terror and depict real and symbolic sexual degradation and abuse.148 It is diffcult to untangle all the reasons such texts are produced and consumed. Mythology offers ample representations of consumptive gazing and uncontrolled desire leading to violence, as fgured by the sexual violence of various gods (Zeus!) and heroes. As discussed later, the violence of the myths of D & C fgure the fear the deeply desiring Daphnis and his society have regarding the power Chloe exerts. Such depictions apparently satisfed sadistic desires to see women dominated and exposed to public view by some men; desire and sadism will be closely paired in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (Lateiner, “Humiliation”). On the contrary, some

Theoretical background 59 readers would identify with the vulnerable and abused protagonist, male as well as female,149 although we must take into account the lived imbalance of power between men and women. Such physical violations are metaphors for the psychological and spiritual penetrations and disruptions that intense desire brings, often quite against our will; sometimes characters struggle against passion as against a god. In L & K, episodes of evisceration and exposure fgure the uncovering of hidden mysteries, and the virginity ordeal presented by Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus determines whether the body, that public identity, has survived the travels in adventure time, which allows the protagonist to assume their public roles.150 Note that during Callirhoe’s Babylonian trial, virginity is not an issue: Callirhoe’s body has been compromised, but her essential devotion to Chaereas—the real matter of concern—has not. Further, theories of vision offered by Platonists, Stoics and atomists detailed how the sight of an object, or even a vivid description, especially of the beautiful, was able to penetrate and disrupt body and soul, as in the shattering experience of “love at frst sight” or the effects of the “evil eye.”151 The Greek novelists agree with Christian apologists such as Clement of Alexandria that the senses (particularly sight) are ambassadors of pleasure. The Aithiopika takes this further; Charikleia and Theagenes’ loveat-frst-sight moment suggests a Platonic remembering, while Charikleia’s conception and physical form is owed to Persinna’s glance at a painting of Andromeda. And, as discussed later, psychoanalytic theory considers how children’s evolving personalities use things and people they see to (problematically) construct themselves as unifed subjects that desire and are desired. Debates over desire sharpened with the onset of Romanticism and its reaction against the certainties and repressions of the Age of Reason and early industrial/capitalist society. Romantic writers, poets and other artists embraced feeling against reason (Rousseau!) and created a cult of the desiring passions. For example, the restlessness of desire, its independence from traditional moralisms, and its status as a dynamic force propelling humans toward unrealized divine potentials are central themes in Goethe’s Faust. Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past gives a type of autobiography of the desiring being (Goodheart 3–5). Freud (especially in Civilization and Its Discontents) saw the repression of desire as the price for civilized life. Authors such as William Morris and, later, Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown posited a vision of utopia wherein desire and reason would no longer be at war and repression forgotten. The realm of desire now becomes a signifer of freedom and liberation; desire becomes the truth. But even earlier, in Plato’s Gorgias, Callicles posited the centrality of desire and its fulfllment against Socratic rationality (Grg. 491e–492c). Desire and even eros have been seen as important components to education since Plato. Recall Aristotle’s insight: “All humans by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves” (Metaph. 980a;

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Cambiano; Carson 70–71). For Aristotle, anything that promoted activity was a form of desire, and there were universal desires to know and to be virtuous, as well as those tied to the senses and bodily appetites. Further, for Socrates’ Diotima, since love is the child of poverty and resourcefulness, desire, facing various obstacles, makes lovers learn resourcefully to overcome the various material and social obstacles to their love, preventing premature closure in their discoveries of desire.152 Further, the Platonic form of the beautiful is fundamental to higher education and especially important in love (Morgan, “Plato” 150; Gillespie), for physical beauty is the easiest route to the recognition of the supermundane forms of perfection (Pl. Phdr. 249b–250a). Thus, Daphnis and Chloe respond emotionally and intellectually to nature’s beauty; seeing the beautiful draws them frst to the desire to imitate, which evokes the desire to create more original forms of beauty; such competition with nature becomes a cornerstone of their education (Gillespie 429). Nature also implants desires that allow human beings to teach themselves, but the truely human requires the augmentation of nature with culture.153 Desire for the beautiful beloved is a force for creativity, and thus, the beauty-loving Daphnis is also a fne musician. But more practically, it is a desire to marry Chloe that makes Daphnis learn important truths about the sociopolitical order, as well as about sexuality. Desire for revenge against the Great King makes Chaereas uncover his Greek heroic potential, as it is love for Leukippe that makes Kleitophon uncover sources of true decency in himself. It is her desire to get to Meroe and marry Theagenes that allows Charikleia to uncover her Odyssean as well Dionysian sides. On the contrary, Apuleius’ initial tale of Socrates and Meroe the witch clearly subverts Platonic notions of the dominant power of reason, and I hold with those critics who see the platonizing tale of Cupid and Psyche crafted as a seductive, but false, fable (Penwill, “Refections”). Further by seeking the non-self, desire discovers and defnes the self, uncovering deep potentials for being and becoming. desire for an item often involves its simultaneous contemplation from multiple perspectives: the ideal image of a lover vs. the real person, the present moment vs. the future, that which is you vs. that which is other (Carson 30–37 and 83–85). The desiring mind is creative and engages in fction-making, so to speak, for all desire can be said to frst start in the imagination through the creation of phantasia.154 Out of an imagination fueled by desire arise multiple paradoxes and novelties; our novels are rich with paradoxical presentations of love, each new item teaching the lovers (and readers) something different (Heiserman, “Aphrodisian Chastity” 281–96). Such paradoxes impel the mind to go beyond the usual categories to fnd more complex unity and to observe and interrelate varied different levels of signifcance. Some other varieties of desire A distinction is often made between the desire for some specifc thing, e.g., for a particular woman or local fame, and desire, as an entity that goes

Theoretical background 61 beyond specifc need, and does not require a determined object.155 This more radical species of desire is often termed “illimitable desire” a “desire for desire” that some critics have viewed as an essential property of human existence. For some critics, utilitarian reason, balancing specifc pleasures and desires against social goods, reduces the human to an unfree agent, while the path of desire asserts a more radical freedom (Bersani 18). Gilgamesh’s mother Ninsun asked the gods why they had put a restless spirit in her son.156 Odysseus’ restless nature likewise is often noted, and the pothos of Alexander was a major theme in various Alexander texts.157 Although his concern is primarily more “pandemic” love, Ovid in two passages (Am. 3.11a, line 20 and Her. 19.104) used the phrase amor amoris (“the love of love”) to suggest the possibility of desire itself as an object, thus expressing a more “illimitable” desire. Petronius sees the Roman imperium as controlling the world, but still unsatisfed with what it has gained (Sat. 119.1.3; Barton 51). Much later, Augustine described a desire that has assumed existential properties (Conf. 3.1). Thus, as for Plato, Augustine could view desire as an unavoidable dimension of human life, one able even to be a necessary goad for proper spiritual development. As we shall see, Apuleius’ Lucius, who wants to know everything or nearly everything (Met. 1.20), offers the best example of such desire, although the endless kisses of Daphnis and Chloe are a metonymy for the infnitude of desire each fnds in the other. Plato suggested that increasingly rarifed forms of desire raise the lover upward to the ultimate Idea of Beauty, the telos of love. Plato, in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, makes Eros a particularly human entity, one who leads to the vision of the Idea of the Good. In the Phaedrus, desire for the vision of the beautiful helps the soul regain its lost wings, a moment when the lover looks upon the deepest truths and thus feels godlike;158 our amatory novels are flled with allusions to such mystic revelations. In Longus’ platonically tinged novel, Daphnis is linked to the aggressively sexual goats he tends, as indicated when Daphnis falls into a pit with a goat who has just had a sex-motivated battle (1.11). Daphnis is then pulled up by Chloe’s breastband with Dorkon’s help, which symbolizes how Chloe will raise Daphnis to a higher level (Epstein, “Education” 25–40). Literature focuses on the negative dimensions of desire, which here need little detail. But note that Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium illustrates an implicit problem common to the erotic romances: All the couples seem to want is each other, which tends not to lead to philosophic enlightenment (Hunter, “Response” 193–94). Eros is inherently “bittersweet” (Carson) and the lover can feel emptied, ruined, and thus images of dissolution are common in our novels. Desire, unable to be satisfed, seeks increasingly perverse satisfactions, such as roses in winter or drawing down the Moon; recall that Nero was a “lover of the impossible” (Tac. Ann. 15.42; Barton 51–53); in Heliodorus, the unnamed friend of Nausikles must fnd a rare famingo for his mistress, Isias of Chemmis (6.4). The body, though its various senses, is permeable, able to be deeply wounded by eros; the false deaths and dismemberments seen in Achilles Tatius and Apuleius fgure the effects of this

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internal violence (Ballengee 145). In L & K, the messiness of Eros as fgured by the alternate erotic novellae and doublets (such as the beheaded prostitute and Leukippe), by alliances among Pan, Artemis, Eros and Aphrodite, items that imply real limits to the sort of erotic integrity that Charikleia insists on (and partially achieves) in the Aithiopika. A dedication to desire can be a tyrant who rejects ethical or practical concerns. Heliodorus’ Demainete and Arsake embody such amoral and compulsive desires as do the wicked stepmother and the mass-murderess in Apuleius. Desire tempts individuals to live in world of illusion, or to confuse life and art, as Chariton’s Artaxerxes pursues a phantom Callirhoe on the royal hunt; desire befuddles Lucius’ mind and perspectives. Uncontrolled desire can promote the fragmented self, torn between impulses, becoming a tyrannized self, one ruled by every whim (Goodheart 15). The desire to mix categories of purity and perversion provides one perspective on the erotic, and all our novels, especially L & K, have this dimension (Bataille). Certainly, our ideal Greek novels present vivid images and scenes of desire resulting in debilitation, loss of self-control, the ruin of reputation and the breakdown of family and even of the state. For example, Chariton’s Chaereas, instead of leading the search for Callirhoe, weeps below deck (3.3.13); Longus’ Gnathon is an archetypal akolastos and Achilles Tatius’ Kleinias (1.7) and especially Kallisthenes (2.13) are creatures of desire, the latter losing for a time his social reputation. Heliodorus gives us monsters of lust, criminality and tyranny in his Demainete and the unbridled Arsake. Lucius’ improper curiosity is well known,159 and his career of desire leads him to eventually lose his human identity, and his recovery comes through the conquest of some desires through his devotion to Isis. The ability to become totally absorbed, to become a voyeur, as noted above, can dissolve all sense of reality, proportion and ability to act,160 as seen when Kleitophon is overwhelmed by the sight of Alexandria (5.1). While our ideal novels certainly show desire as enervating and even transgressive, they also assume the idealizing position that such strong desires (even the more existential ones) might be adequately fulflled and be central to the betterment of the world as well as of the individual. All this can be dismissed as displaying a puerile “love makes the world go around” attitude. But just as tragedy is interesting in its varied presentation of tragic views of the human condition, so exactly how comedy and romance show the fulfllment and even triumph of love and the career of desire are fruitful items of study. As we shall observe, our amatory novels indeed can be seen as idealizing novels of desire.

Love, desire and Lacan Identity formation is not just a social and cultural process, but also a psychological one, perhaps the ultimate drama and thus a great theme of literature. Lacanian theory, useful for this analysis, has made steady inroads into Classics.161 Classics scholars, such as Miller and Janan,162 have proftably

Theoretical background 63 employed Lacanian insights to analyze Roman elegiac poetry, which engages issues similar to those in our novels. Lacanian theory is extremely important for current flm studies.163 Admittedly, Lacan’s theories hold little weight among psychologists, particularly in the USA, and feminist scholars take serious issue with aspects of psychoanalysis in general and Lacan’s theories in particular (Bernheimer and Kahane). Here I must focus fairly generally on those principles most applicable to my analysis. Lacan’s theories concentrate on how humans are formed by what they lack, particularly concerning desire. For Lacan, true desire is what is constantly being sought and misrecognized in various objects, often being an unfndable quality, such as the notion of a unifed self, or the craving for the unattainable knowledge of what some other wants of us. Our deepest desire is for a secure being, a desire connected to how we construct ourselves frst through images and then through symbolic/semiotic systems incapable of providing any fxed point upon which to establish that secure being. Our language and cultural systems form around a kind of traumatic kernel, that emptiness at being’s center, for which some mythic, primal sin or fall often becomes a metaphor. Different times and cultures have manifested a wide variety of perspectives and practices about matters such as sexuality, but why? Lacan posits that all these varied perspectives and practices are attempts to understand and control a Real that cannot be ft into our systems of language and experience. Porter and Buchan (7) describe the modern myth that the history of Classical culture is the history of the subject’s self-discovery. The Lacanian perspective can explain how in reality Classical authors from Homer onward registered a lack of unity at the center of being and language, and the conficts that arise when ideologies, attempting to impose a unifed reality, encounter this abyss. This dimension can suggest the (im)possibility of any truly ideal, utopian conclusion. Orders of reality and their traumas Where Freud saw the ego as the center of our being, endlessly infuenced by the unconscious, Lacan sees the unconscious as central and the “ego” a kind of fction created by the unconscious, largely inaccessible to us, whose primary role is creating workarounds for the central traumas of our lives. Like Frye, Lacan is anti-realist for whom literature, at best, engages in the same sort of projections and fction-making we do, quite automatically, in our daily lives. For Lacan, there are three interpenetrating and conficting orders of reality164 —the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The Real (used also by Jameson) is that aspect of existence that cannot be suffciently ft into any explanatory system. For example, the unexpected operations of Tychē/Fortune or of the gods, so common in our novels, fgure the inexplicable operations of the Real. These three realms (Real, Imaginary and Symbolic) are associated with the traumas of identity formation. The frst few months of life, when the infant saw no separation from itself and the world,

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was a blissful dream that now haunts our lives. The helpless child is dependent on another fgure (the mother, often the real mother) for the satisfaction of its needs. The infant’s need and another’s power to satisfy that need create a foundational model for future sexual relationships based on desire. The frst trauma occurs when the infant realizes a potentially threatening separation between itself and the world (especially from the need-satisfying mother) whose ways are incomprehensible. Further, because the (m)other seems to want something that cannot be defned, for all our lives the question hovers over us, a primal cause of anxiety: “What does the other really want from me?” The couple’s ideal ability to fnd satisfaction in each other stands in contrast to their greater than normal problems with aspects of the parent-child relationship of dependency and desire sometimes glimpsed in the novels. Our protagonists profoundly desire each other and also tend to demand (sometimes aggressively) to be the other’s complete desire. This is obvious in D & C, where both protagonists (especially Chloe) wonder what makes the other desirable (“Was it the music?” wonders Chloe [1.13]) as they want to be the desire of their partner. A possessive aggression in turn arises from the fearful need for the other, as is manifested especially in D & C’s three inserted tales, which describe the violent aggression of desiring males against the desired women. The child enters the developmental realm of the Imaginary upon recognizing itself in images found in refecting surfaces or in the wholeness of others (the mirror stage). By thus “recognizing” an image of itself, it creates the frst (ultimately incomplete and even illusory) notion of the “I” or ego and one version of a personal identity. The realm of the Imaginary functions through the child’s tendency to identify what is really Other and external as self or a stand-in for self. Tragically, there is a gap between the image’s wholeness and the lack of control that the individual child experiences. To ease this tension, the child can so identify with the image that all differences with it are repressed, an intense identifcation often accompanied by an aggressive urge to totally possess that image. The child begins to have its frst narcissistic fantasies. This fantasy image of wholeness has a lasting power, and all our lives will be preoccupied with misrecognizing other items as possessing or providing this wholeness. The impact of the Imaginary is demonstrated through the power specular images have to captivate, sometimes stun us, even when there seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the admired object and its admirer. Scenes of such rapturous viewing are fairly common in our novels, as is the consumptive gaze165 that can also be associated with the power of the specular image. Seeking objet a The problem is that individuals really are narcissistically seeking that elusive Lacanian objet a, the images or conceptions we have of other items which we mistake for wholes or the potential to make us whole. Further, to be a

Theoretical background 65 lover is to know at some level your beloved demands something you cannot give (Hill 64), and you demand what your beloved also cannot give, that is, a secure sense of identity. Since obtaining objet a is impossible, we, desiring individuals, repeatedly misrecognize some object as a suitable stand-in for objet a. And if one constructs the self only through identifcations made through recognition of an external other, one becomes dependent on and a rival to that other, creating anger and fear. Further, these misrecognitions tend to lose their power to compel us, leading to another search. Such (mis)-identifcations of the ego with their ever-shifting images of completeness and satisfaction, along with attitudes of adoration and aggression, will continue throughout life, often with baleful effect. The frequent gap between what the lover loves in the beloved and what the beloved objectively possesses can help explain some indefniteness about exactly what the lover actually loves in the beloved. We often ask: “What does she or he see in her or him?” The idealness of their physical beauty or character only means that they are a readier screen for others’ projections. This is why Xenophon of Ephesus’ Aegialeus can still see the mummifed Thelxinoe if she were still a young girl (5.1). It may also explain, for example, in the case of Chariton’s depiction of his characters, why so many mythic images, some contradictory, are employed, or how heroine can become identifed with characters radically unlike her (e.g., Charikleia with Thisbe). Clearly, a major fantasy of the ideal novel is that the beloved remains for the lover a suitable, enduring substitute for objet a, despite numerous other opportunities to become (as is often the case) aware of the insuffciencies of the beloved. Note how, for the protagonist’s lover(s), for the protagonist’s fellow citizens as well as for many outsiders and even for the reader, the protagonist is presented as a powerful substitute for that true, sublime object of desire. This perspective allows us to see our texts as a series of discourses about the (mis-)pursuit of illusive and slippery objects of desire, in various incarnations, as it applies to polis as well as to eros. Fall into language and the fctions of identity and subjectivity The third, most major trauma, is the infant’s “fall” into language, into the realm of the Symbolic. Lacan sees notions of truth166 and especially the self as constructed through the brain’s innate production of linguistic/semiotic structures that organize our conscious and unconscious. Following Saussure, Lacan sees language as a web of relations (a is defned by b, which is defned by c, which is defned by . . . ), with an absence at its center, the end point of an endless series of “why?” questions where the only reply left at the end is “z is because that is how it is.” This larger system which we are embedded in and constructed by, while not fully aware of it, is Lacan’s Big Other.167 Language (and culture is a symbolic system coextensive with language) defnes us as subjects, beings that “do X” or “are X.” Within the Symbolic realm, the child becomes a kind of “empty” signifer, because

66 Theoretical background what the child signifes is determined by symbolic structures external to the child and thus to some extent other to the child. Thus, the very language we use to speak of desire has been created by exterior others, condemning us always to speak desire in another’s language. The infant must initially learn that language in order to understand and satisfy that inscrutable, powerful, desire-fulflling mother-fgure. Accordingly, Lacan describes a relation of extimacy between our subjectivity and the exterior world, for it is largely through interchanges with the exterior world and its language that we develop our so-called subjectivity. We are accordingly divided and alienated, because of the gap between what we feel we are and what the images and defnitions originating outside of us, that we use to construct our self-image, are. Alienation and trauma can occur when we perceive a gap between what society demands of us and what our own (often inscrutable) wills want. The Lacanian subject becomes fully aware of its subject status at the moment of this non-recognition; thus, the tragedy of Achilles, that exemplar of the Homeric hero, arises from what society tells him he is versus what he feels himself to be (Porter and Buchan 12). Achilles’ own subjectivity is most obvious at the moment in which he is threatened with disappearing into a subjectivity created by his acceptance of others’ views of him and his social roles. Its thought now dominated by the Symbolic realm, the child becomes aware of a split between its own subjectivity and its existence as an object within language—including the individual’s own utterance—an act that constitutes the individual, at the same time making the individual dependent and contingent, a signifer that has meaning only in (socially constructed) relations to other signifers. The Symbolic realm functions not only through making identifcations, but by forging connections and distinctions among chains of items (the signifers). Because within this system distinctions are also made between human beings and their varied functions (especially their ability to obstruct or promote the fulfllment of desire), the Symbolic provides a foundation for society, as the Symbolic becomes the imperium of power and law. This movement along metonymic168 chains in sense creates time, but one possessing signifcant amounts of repetition and atemporality. We remember (and re-remember) bits of life information (events, emotions, etc.) and forge new links among them, making them a part of our now, oftentimes changing the past as we move into the future. The past is like a site of trauma, and we keep going back to the scene of the crime, so to speak, to try, via recombinatory (re)readings, to make some fnal sense of what we are and what we have suffered. One suspects the almost mechanically numerous dangers Anthia and the other heroines endure from unwanted lovers resembles a repeated return to the site of trauma. Thus, as critics study a narrative of events, recollections of events and the accompanying contradictions, they might consider these contractions are actually the manifestation of a re-experienced (and thus

Theoretical background 67 new and rewritten) past and site of trauma. And this returns us to the role of fantasy. Lacan saw fantasy (like our novels): . . . as a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with this traumatic kernel. . . . [“Going through a fantasy” is] the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, just flls out a lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing “behind” the fantasy; the fantasy is precisely a construction the function of which is to hide this void, this “nothing,” i.e., the lack in the Other. (Žižek, “Lacanian Real”) Our amatory novels superfcially concern the possibility of an impossible fulfllment of amatory/erotic desire; but as dense networks of signifers that represent various engagements with desire, with secure being as our ultimate object of desire, our novels also function as a fantasy of a wholeness of identity and being. This possibility is most obvious in the novels of Longus and Heliodorus, while Achilles Tatius and Apuleius pull aside the curtains on this fantasy. Chariton’s novel, substantially grounded in historiography, shows Chaereas producing a public (and thus partially extrinsic) narrative that gives a workable form and sense to the traumas he has suffered, while Callirhoe alone acknowledges the power of Aphrodite, who fgures the unpredictable manifestations of Real as encountered through the productions of desire. Law and name of the father The law is the controller of desirable objects and the “name of the father” designates structures and individuals (including real fathers) that speak for and enforce the symbolic order, possessing power (word of the father) to defne who you are, in what modalities you exist and to what extent you can obtain desired objects. Thus, the father embodies what limits the attainment of desire. In Lacan’s version of the Oedipus complex, the resented father is that set of linguistic and cultural structures that separate you from the mother-fgure and later punishes you for trying to obtain that which is both forbidden/impossible to get, but still deeply desired. Because the Symbolic order attempts to account for all the items within human experience and the relations between them (especially involving desire and possession), it becomes bound up with Lacan’s regime of law, which serves to say No and thus to prevent the (logically impossible) total fulfllment of desire. Indeed, it is the force of desire for what is regulated by law that forces the individual to fully learn society’s language and its rules and practices. But, however logically necessary, the law is resented, because there always seems (and in fact is) an excess of oppression. For the young person (particularly in patriarchal societies), father-fgures are personifcations of the law, and desire

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raises the standard of rebellion against unnecessary constraints to the fulfllment of desire. To desire in part is to desire to transgress, and, in Lacan’s reading, one must slay the father, not to gain possession of the mother, but to stop the suffocating strictures of the Symbolic (and thus the social) order. Arising from the comic archetype, our novels are flled with father-fgures, who are able to lay down the law concerning us and our desires, but whose power is partially circumvented by the protagonists. The symbolic system of culture and law likewise promotes consoling misrecognitions of ideals of wholeness; for Achilles, the ideal is untouchable kleos; for Charikleia, it is the image of untouchable chastity. When Agamemnon disgraces Achilles, the soon-to-die son of Thetis, Achilles questions why he must fght and die. The answer is found in the word of that ultimate father Zeus who gives out joy and sadness as he will in the system he maintains. Hydaspes would have given a similar answer to the victims to be sacrifced at Meroe, who stands for all the youth and innocence that must be absurdly sacrifced to a demanding other. In contrast, Odysseus’ “self” seems both utterly full and utterly empty because all his multifold appearances and actions do not point clearly back to some kernel of coherent identity (Porter and Buchan 13). But there exists one important difference: As noted, every society is comprised of various social formations and thus of different cultural and symbolic systems, different words of different fathers. Achilles’ elite, heroic commitment to a rigid system of honor and anger only bends enough to accept his enemies as worthy (if doomed) participants in that system. But Odysseus’s story tells of how he comes to see that keeping up heroic appearances as optional and learns to follow a new Word that provides recognition in home, family and a more empathetic humanity that sees no gloat-worthy glory in even in justly slain men. Even further, it can be argued that for Freud and Lacan, the function of the Ego is to deceive, to make the world seem manageable. The trickster Odysseus knows that life is a constant round of deceptions, substitutions and tricks, most of which need to be held only provisionally— and Athena approves his cunning. As in Comedy, our amatory novels show protagonists suffering the word of the father, fnding ways to circumvent that word and even to pronounce their own new word. This struggle is manifested in the confict between strict moralisms and comic improvisation and knavery. To give just one example, in Callirhoe, Hermocrates, a staunch upholder of the law, pronounces a word which is initially obstructive, being reluctant to allow Callirhoe to marry his rival’s son (1.1), but, after the marriage becomes helpful, even defending the self-condemning Chaereas who has apparently killed Callirhoe (1.5). He is eventually supplanted by Chaereas’ word during Chaereas’ speech before the assembled Syracusans (7.7–8) that describes what would seem to be a profound scandal (Callirhoe married another man who now keeps Chaereas’ son). But instead of scandal, Chaereas renews Syracusan society as he constructs, reworking various master narratives, his own drama. Callirhoe, when in Asia and detached from the governing law of Syracuse, although

Theoretical background 69 she constantly defnes herself as Hermocrates’ daughter, must transgressively redefne herself both in relationship to Hermocrates and in relation to various governing male Words, especially those of Dionysius. It is her word that defnes (for Dionysius) the child’s identity. But Callirhoe returned to Syracuse, during the last scene within Aphrodite’s shrine, shows her seemingly reassuming the traditional status she had in the frst book, subordinate again to the word of the father (fgures). Women and forms of knowing Further, for Lacan, woman as an entity has no meaning within the Symbolic order, existing merely as an exclusion, that which Man is not. The female body can be seen capable of receiving the divine effatus as in the case of the Pythia or Sibyl.169 Indeed, both the radically divine and the feminine represent challenges to the Symbolic order, which tries to create social structures to contain and control their disruptive potentials. Thus, Woman and the feelings She elicits can be associated with all items and experiences that lie outside the limits of the Symbolic order, including those associated with madness and revelation, with mystical unions and identifcations with the divine, in which the self is destroyed, only to fnd itself part of a greater identity, which agrees with the identifcation of the female protagonist as a stand-in for a divinity. Normal forms of pain and pleasure can serve to reinforce the norms of society, but these sensations, transgressing usual categories of pain and pleasure, undermine the canonical system of rewards and punishments. This connects with how the language of mystery religion is used in respect to sublime moments of sexuality. Emotional roilings, feelings of tearing and fragmentation, even of alienation from standard social and erotic roles, occur in our novels, and the question arises as to whether even here we touch the sublime. Now, with this theoretical anteludium concluded, let it move to a fuller consideration of the ideal in specifc emplotment.

Notes 1 For Ricoeur, a narrative’s believability depends on the prefgured worlds of authors and readers, their general pre-understanding of how fctional and “real” worlds work (his mimesis1). The process of confguration or emplotment produces a sensible meaning-structure out of narrative elements (mimesis2); fnally, the world of the narrative is restored and rendered somehow applicable, to the real world through the refguration of the story by readers (mimesis3). Thus, “a prefgured time . . . becomes refgured time through the mediation of confgured time.” See Dornisch 309, quoting Ricoeur, Time 3:54. Indeed, for Ricoeur, the reader only had a true understanding of work when reading led to some action, either interior (emotional acceptance or rejection) or exterior (a change in perception or behavior); see Ricoeur, 3:158–74; also Venema. 2 Propp; Aarne; Dundes; Sowa. 3 In Hopkins’ letter to Baillie of January 14, 1883; Bender 74–77.

70 Theoretical background 4 I refer to Iser’s notion of the “implied” or “ideal” reader, guided by those literary structures that the author himself thought most important for the interpretation of a text. 5 Beer 16, quoting from the Preface to the 1877 edition of Henry James’ The American. 6 In his analysis of the symbol, which Frye defned as “any unit of literary structure that can be isolated for critical attention” (Anatomy 71), he used a modifed version of the medieval notion of four levels of criticism; Frye’s own system has fve; see Denham, Northrop Frye and Critical Method 33. First is the literal level, which views a literary work as a largely self-contained series of interlocking motifs and images; second is descriptive criticism, which links the work’s elements to historical and cultural realities; the third is formal criticism, which looks for allegorical meanings, the story beyond the explicit story; the fourth, mythical/ archetypal criticism, analyzes a work in terms of those archetypal patterns it shares with all cultural productions, and thus as part of that greater dialogue about the human condition; lastly, in anagogic criticism, the critic perceives the meaning of literature as a whole, perhaps also as the “dream of mankind.” On anagogic criticism, see Denham, Northrop Frye and Critical Method 47–50. On Frye in general, I have also used Denham, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary; Hamilton; Gill, Northrop; Russell, Northrop. 7 See in particular Frye, Secular Scripture, Stubborn Structure, Fables, Educated Imagination and Great Code. 8 Denham, Northrop Frye and Critical Method 152–56; Frye, Fables 152 and Educated Imagination 23; also Ricoeur, Rule. 9 As it was for Freud and Lacan; see Lacan esp. 222 ff. 10 Denham, Northrop Frye and Critical Method 1–3, 32 and 112–13. For Frye, the characters of romance, being more archetypal and less individualistic as compared to characters in realistic novels, more explicitly manifest ethos because to a greater degree they are functions of their social position and history (Anatomy 304). 11 Especially troubling is Frye’s subordination of all myth and narratives to one “monomyth” and other rigid (sometimes contradictory) analytical patterns, as well as his notion of a historical “cycle of literary modes,” his strained use of Freudian and Jungian theories and his relative disregard for the role of individual creators; see Wimsatt; Lentricchia 3–26. 12 Reardon fnds the overall patterns of Frye’s Secular Scripture to be useful (Form 172–80). 13 Indeed, romançar meant “to compose in the vernacular”; Beer 4–6. 14 Scourfeld, “Chaereas” 292; Höschele; Fusillo, Romanzo 43–55; Mason “Chaireas”; also Borgogno; Corbato. 15 Frye, Anatomy 43–48, 162–95 and 316–24; Denham, Northrop Frye and Critical Method 70. 16 For example, considering theft simply a moral crime, rather than to consider the circumstances leading to the act (starvation), as in the case of Hugo’s Jean Valjean. 17 Frye, Anatomy 67–70. A vivid example of the lucky hero is Chétien de Troyes’ Perceval. 18 Thus our protagonist’s initial adventures touch most closely on the essence of romance, which is adventure; the fght to the death is linked to tragedy (e.g., Chaereas’ suicidal participation in the Egyptian rebellion), the hero’s (temporary) defeat or disappearance to irony and satire (enslavement, false death and metamorphosis) and the hero’s return or resurrection to comedy. 19 On the relationship between the Greek novels and hagiographic literature, see Hägg, Novel 154–65; Pervo; Ramelli.

Theoretical background 71 20 Also a theme in the philosophies of Cynicism, Stoicism and even Epicureanism. 21 Frye’s archetypal romance/quest plot has three elements: a confict with its initial wanderings and adventures (agōn), a death struggle (pathos) and a recognition (anagnōrisis), the latter element that is often preceded by a disappearance or temporary defeat of the hero, such as Jesus’ crucifxion or the false deaths of our protagonists; Frye, Anatomy 186–87. 22 A somewhat abstract example: a sixth-phase romance, in which the hero or his society are marginal or eccentric (like Cervantes’ Don Quixote), can express the increased marginalization of the social formation represented, such as forms of the medieval warrior nobility, which was becoming obsolete in Cervantes’ era. 23 Denham, Northrop Frye and Critical Method 78–80 and 119–22; Frye, Anatomy 54–58, 184–86 and 315–26. 24 An extension of the Classical rhetorical practice of amplicatio recommended by critics such as Cassiodorus, Martianus Capella, Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John Garland; see Vinaver 68–75. 25 This complexity also accords with Bakhtin’s depiction of the novel’s inherent heteroglossia and polyphony; see Holquist 69–70; Morson and Emerson 139–45. 26 Such demonic images are particularly evident in Xenophon’s Ephesiaka; Apuleius’ markedly non-ideal Metamorphoses is replete with images of the world as an existential hell, from which Isis-worship liberates (?) Lucius. 27 Initiation rituals sometime involve a forced removal of young people into a wilderness or dangerous space; Gennep; Turner; Sourvinou-Inwood. Among the Greeks there were wanderings and symbolic ritual battles youth participated in as a prelude to their re-incorporation into the community; Dowden, Death 71–94. The deaths or exiles of youths such as Hippolytus, Iphigeneia or to a certain extent Achilles, in part suggest a failed transition into full adulthood. Ritual stories of cannibalism and other savagery suggest fears of animal and sub-human predators and the human potential for such behavior. Thus note the cannibalistic sacrifce of Leukippe (Ach. Tat. 3.15) seen also in Lollianus’ Phoinikika; see Sandy, Phoenician Story 812 and “Notes”; Stephens and Winkler 314–57. 28 Concerning this pattern, see Sowa 213–35. The narrative’s saturation with religious/philosophic elements and divine activity offer structural and thematic elements common to the myths and rituals of a mystery cult; see Frye, Secular Scripture 13; Beck, “Mystery Religions” 131–50; Reardon, Form 169–72; Merkelbach, Roman. 29 On themes of descent and ascent, see Frye, Secular Scripture 97–157; Reardon, Form 173–74. 30 Many protagonists see themselves as the victims of baleful fortune; Reardon, Form 25–26: Tychē is also a major player in Hellenistic New Comedy; see Ruiz Montero, “Rise” 54, citing Vogt-Spira. The role of Tyche was a signifcant topos of Hellenistic history (see Polyb. 29.21.5). 31 Whose myth Daphnis and Chloe mime (2.37), suggesting that it is also their story too. 32 Doublets appear in the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, where Clement has two brothers who regain their identity, whose father Faustus takes the appearance of Simon Magus, who is the evil opposite of St. Peter; see Frye, Secular Scripture 141. 33 As when Heliodorus’ protagonists are confned in Arsake’s palace; also when Chariton’s Chaereas is confned in the slave-prison on Mithridates’ estate, with Callirhoe placed in the harem of the Great King; Babylon itself is like a great prison, where no one is free; the four-mill in the Metamorphoses is a similar hell-prison (9.12).

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34 Observe, in Heliodorus, the mazelike island of Thyamis’ bandits (1.6), the cavetomb where Charikleia is hidden (1.29) or Knemon’s stumbling through the dark in Nausikles’ house, fearing Thisbe is somehow alive (5.3). Xenophon’s Anthia is confned in a pit with dogs (4.6). 35 Sometimes these trials, especially those in Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, become instruments of vindication. 36 Lucius’ transformation back into a human being is characteristic of another motif familiar in medieval romance, in which somebody is freed from enchantment, for example, in the fable of Sleeping Beauty. This motif also appears in Antonius Diogenes’ Wonders Beyond Thule. 37 For example, the wedding of Lamb in Rev. 19, or Jesus’ parable that compared the Kingdom to a wedding feast (Matt. 22:1–14). 38 Such transformational fgures are found among various non-industrial, nonJudeo-Christian cultures; Cook 70–81. 39 Recall how, in comedy, the past conceals the key to a true identity that brings with it a better future, while tragedy’s past reveals a curse or primal evil dooming the future. 40 Such a return to the Urzeit is stressed especially by Eliade. It is also often a notable component of eschatological/apocalyptic discourse; Cook 28. 41 Among many heroes whose histories conform to his pattern, Rank (3–65) mentions Sargon, Cyrus the Great, Paris Alexander, Perseus, Tristan, Romulus and Remus and Heracles. There are other versions of the hero’s journey, such as Lord Raglan’s. 42 See 1.1.1–2, 1.1.6, 1.14.1, 2.3.6–7, 3.2.14–16, 4.1.9, 4.1.11, 4.7.5–7, 5.3.3, 5.3.9 and 8.6.11. 43 Charit. 1.1.5, 2.2.7, 2.3.9, 3.6.3, 3.8.6, 3.9.5 and 8.4.10. See Edwards, Acts 36–39. 44 As various young women in Greek myths hang from beams, for example, the daughter of the Athenian Icarius; Burkert, Homo 64–65. 45 Dowden (Death) details similar myths and rituals connected with Iphigeneia, the daughters of Proitos, the “little bears” of Artemis, the Danaids, Achilles, Leukippos and various others; see also Garland 194–96; Burkert, Homo 58–72. 46 This theme continues prominently in later romantic literature, on some occasions being a symbolic death, such as when a daughter is to be married off by her parents to a loathsome suitor (Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or James Cameron’s Titanic), so that the girl’s family may beneft. 47 As illustrated by the Hittite Telephinus myth; Burkert, Structure 123–42; also Foley 104–05; Sowa 282. 48 Seen in the myths of Tyro, mother of Pelias, Melanippe, Antiope, Io, Danaë and Auge; Burkert, Structure 6–7; Sowa 95–108. 49 Related to this is the “search for the lost consort” paradigm. The male protagonists of Xenophon and Chariton often go searching after their mates, echoing the pattern wherein a god/goddess loses a consort (often to Death), goes searching and manages to bring back or revive the consort. Perhaps the most famous of these myths was that of Isis (with whom Charikleia and Lucius are associated) and Osiris. 50 Their parents’ actions, nonsensical in terms of real-world motivation, make sense in terms of the archetypal pattern. Consider the names Anthia and Habrocomes, which particularly stress the youthfulness and fertility often sacrifced in such myths. 51 Psyche’s story in parts also fts the pattern of the young woman sacrifced to Death. 52 See Burkert, Structure 139; Sowa 96; Foley 86–90; Clay 261 ff.

Theoretical background 73 53 According to one variant of the Adonis myth, Aphrodite had to share Adonis with Persephone for part of the year; Burkert, Structure 108–11. 54 Callirhoe is presumed dead, buried with an elaborate funeral, taken from her tomb and then is carried over water, which in myth often exists as a barrier to the lower world. Note, too, how Callirhoe’s journey to Babylon resembles a death journey as Callirhoe crosses the Euphrates via a ferry into Asia’s vastness, a virtual underworld where she will meet the ultimate test to her identity, life and love in the threats posed by Great King’s love; see Alvares, “Hidden Magus.” 55 It unclear to me to what extent the frst performers of religious activity (e.g., as evidenced by Paleolithic burials) used those thought-categories. The activities of an invisible spiritual world may have been as manifest to them as the effects of the invisible forces of magnetism and gravity are to us. 56 Beck, “Mystery Religions” 136, citing Fox 102–261; also Zeitlin, “Religion.” 57 Zeitlin, “Religion” 15, citing MacMullen, Paganism 60–73. 58 Xen. Ephes. 5.15.2. See inscription to Isis on the stele at Rhodes. 59 Beck, “Mystery Religions” 134, citing MacMullen, Paganism 112–30. 60 See Beck, “Mystery Religions” 131–50; Reardon, Form 169–72; Merkelbach, Roman. 61 Dowden, “Fluctuating Meanings” and “Greek Novel.” 62 Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults 107. Zeitlin sees the notion of sex as initiation as an innovation connected with the Second Sophistic (“Religion” 102). 63 The plots of modern amatory romances ever since Richardson’s Pamela have largely shared the same dramatic structure and goal of marriage; see Montague 232–36; Modleski 36. 64 The Symposium and the Phaedrus were part of the rhetorician’s stock; see Hunter, “Longus and Plato” 16; Trapp, “Plato’s Phaedrus” 143–73. 65 Morgan, “Representation” 49, citing Stramaglia 124. 66 Most signifcantly, Leukippe’s name may refer to the Platonic “white horse”; Morales, Vision 66–67. 67 Hellenistic historians had played fast and loose with historical facts and added entertaining material, such as scenes evoking dramas or elaborate ekphrases; see Schwartz, Fünf Vorträge; also Ruiz Montero, “Rise” 42–48. On the issue of history and fction, see the articles in Gill and Wiseman; Veyne, Did; White, Metahistory and Content; also Alvares, “Chariton’s Erotic History”; Werhli; Walbank 216–34. 68 Veyne, Did; also Brillante 93–102. Consider, for example, Servius’ comment on Verg. Aen. 1.235: historia est quicquid secundum naturam dicitur, sive factum sive non factum, ut de Phaedra; cf. Julian.Ep. 301b. 69 For Xenophon’s Cyropaedia as fction, see Tatum, Xenophon’s Imperial Fiction; Stadter, “Fictional Narrative.” 70 For a good discussion see Rose, Sons, especially the frst chapter. 71 See Perkins, Suffering Self 55; Zeitlin, “Religion” 99, who cites Max Weber’s notion of the “theodicy of good Fortune” regarding the powerful. 72 I have used Roberts, Fredric; Homer; Goldstein 146–63; Helmling; Rose, Sons esp. 6–42. 73 In this use of Lacan, Jameson employs Althusser’s notion of the “absent cause”; Roberts, Fredric 73; Rose, Sons 31; Homer 50–52. 74 One complaint is that these are issues that the reader and author did not think of, and could not have thought of; see Rose, Sons 22–24. But, to recycle Marx’s phrase from The German Ideology (Marx and Engels 5:55), critics should not be compelled to “share the illusion of that epoch.”

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75 To give a famous example, the grotesque character of the Iliad ’s Thersites and Odysseus’ treatment of him suggest Thersites’ status as a symbol of the commons’ increasing resistance to forms of aristocratic rule. 76 An important concept here is that of the “structured silence,” in which a text appears to be responding to an opposition that is not itself depicted in the text; on structured silences, see Macherey 125–28; Rose, Sons 36. 77 Jameson, Marxism 384, citing Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques 199–203; Jameson, Political Unconscious 77–78. 78 The “utopian surplus” is that extra (often unintended), ideal signifcance a narrative, theme or image contains; Hudson 106 and 160–64; Bloch, Materialismusproblem 409–17. 79 Jameson, “Reifcation” 137–40, citing the infuence of Holland. 80 Consider Heliodorus as a Syrian defned as an outsider by the gaze and other Greco-Roman social practices; as (at least) a lower-level aristocrat (perhaps one who took pride in the historical links between Emesa and the Severans) who also defned himself in opposition to those lower on the social hierarchy; and, fnally, as a non-Greek author defned functionally as a producer and transmitter of Greek cultural (and ideological) productions in part alien to him. 81 On slaves as animals, see Bradley, “Animalizing.” 82 Owens 39–40, citing Mouritsen 14–15. 83 For discussion see Jameson, Political Unconscious 93–100 and Ideologies 174. 84 Jameson, Political Unconscious 102–05; also White, Metahistory 281–82. 85 See Jameson, Marxism 119 and Political Unconscious 284–85; Rose, Sons 35. 86 I am especially indebted to Hudson; Geoghegan; the essays in Daniel and Moylan; also Jameson, Marxism 116–59. Particularly important are Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia and The Principle of Hope. 87 According to his analysis, the Greek ideal novels correspond to that type of modern, popular literature that Bloch designated as “colportage,” tales of adventure and miracle whose utopian themes lie close to the surface; see Geoghegan 58; Levy, 179–80; Bloch, Principle 1:352–93. 88 See Bloch, Erbshaft; Hudson 42–45; Kaufman 34–35. 89 In consumer advertising and political propaganda, utopian overtones (complete sensual gratifcation and images of a just, harmonious society) sell products, politicians or reactionary programs; Hudson 160–63; Bloch, Materialismusproblem 409–17; Kellner 81–84. 90 Rose, Sons 26, who cites Laclau and Mouffe 154–56. 91 On the increased desire to commune with the Hellenic past, as epitomized, for example, by Apollonius of Tyana’s vision of Achilles or Philostratus’ Heroicus; see Zeitlin, “Visions” esp. 233–66; also Porter, “Ideals.” 92 Bloch’s view of the potentials of time gives emphasis to mysteries concerning origins, such as observed in the stories of Daphnis and Chloe, Charikleia and Tarsia, often suggesting a primal crime, such as those appearing in various myths of a Fall; Jameson, Marxism 131. But in our ideal novels, such primal crimes, however great, have the potential to be rectifed and even to bring about a greater good. 93 Hudson 29. Bloch was a major infuence on liberal theologians of the later twentieth century, such as Harvey Cox; see also Moylan 96–108. 94 Kellner 87–88; also Geoghegan 33. On Bloch’s notion of a “primordial hunger” (Urhunger), see Levy 179. 95 The beggar Odysseus expresses the fears of a society haunted by fear of starvation and the humiliations and trials the poor must undertake to ward it off; Rose, Sons 106–10. 96 Bloch builds upon the Renaissance distinction between natura naturata (created nature) and natura naturans (creating nature), suggesting that, with new

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98 99

100 101

102 103 104 105 106

107 108 109

110 111

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technologies, the causal substratum might itself be reordered by socialist praxis; Hudson 142–51. Bloch frmly distinguished “abstract” utopian visions, which are merely compensatory (dreams of winning a lottery) or fantastic and more concrete utopian longings and visions; see Levitas 67; Geoghegan 38; Bloch, Principle 1:33 and 144–47. Constitutive imagination = Phantasie, which is able to seek the truth even where there are no facts present; Hudson 29. “Latency” and “tendency” are critical concepts; latency pertains to those examples of the past, whose potentials have been blocked, but remain model for future fulfllment, and “tendency” pertains to those elements now existing that are developing toward the ideal; see Geoghegan 32; Hudson 114–15; Jameson, Marxism 146–47. See Levitas 76; Bloch, Principle 1:146. The statement in D & C’s prologue, “For certainly no one has ever avoided love, and no one will, as long as beauty exists, and eyes can see,” implies a reader imaginatively sympathetic to such a view and its values, and thus to an imaginative production embodying those values. As well as some fragmentary novels, such as the Ninus Romance and Metiochus and Parthenope Romance. Muchow 186; Nikolaidis, “Plutarch on Women” 68, citing Walcot 19; also Nikolaidis, “Plutarch’s Fragments” 137, citing Plutarch’s frg. 137 in Stob. 4.20.69. Many cultures have strong traditions of romantic love songs or other manifestations of a sentimental attitude toward romantic love, where nevertheless romantic love has very little to do with actual marriage arrangements; see Walcot 5–33. Konstan, whose argument now is considered a bit overstated. In Chariton and Heliodorus, it is explicitly stated that both heroes were virgins before marriage, as Xenophon of Ephesus too implies; Longus’ Daphnis has had sex before marriage only once, and then after being manipulated by Lycaenion; only Achilles Tatius’ Kleitophon is explicitly said to have had sex with prostitutes. On the hero’s weakness, see Rohde 356; Anderson, Eros 88; Johne 178; Haynes 81; Egger, Women 185. Höschele; Fusillo, Romanzo 43–55; Mason, “Chaireas”; Borgogno; Frye, Anatomy 163–85. Most notably, when Kleitophon has intercourse with Melite (Ach. Tat. 5.27), Daphnis with Lycaenion (Longus 3.18); Habrocomes contemplating union with Kyno (Xen. Ephes. 3.12); Callirhoe marrying Dionysius when still wed to Chaereas. The traditional, reactionary and ideological aspect of the role of women and love has been well detailed; see Egger, Women; Liviabella Furiani, “Di”; Haynes; Johne. Such as the relationship between Hippothoos and Hyperanthes, perhaps Kleisthenes, in Xenophon of Ephesus; between Kleinias and Charikles, as well as between Menelaus and his male lover in Achilles Tatius. Xenophon’s Habrocomes fears being made a prostitute by Korymbos (2.1), and Daphnis, repelling Gnathon, also represents homosexual sex as unnatural (4.12). Swain (“Plutarch’s Moral Program” 93–95) cites frg. XV.276 (Sanbach) and also notes how Plutarch condemns Gorgias for reading a speech to the Greeks on Homonoia, when he could not produce it in his own family; also Cooper 3. For details, see Lattimore 266–300; Ruiz Montero, “Rise” 132; Dill 115. Large crowds are seen in Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus and in Hist. Apoll. reg. Tyr.; while these large crowds are absent

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117 118

119

120 121 122 123 124 125

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Theoretical background from D & C, there is a large banquet at which all the local aristocrats are invited, at which Megacles recognizes Chloe and a large party attends their rustic wedding. Henceforth to be cited, respectively, as Plut. Amat., Conjug. and Cons. uxor. Stadter sees Plutarch’s view of marriage resembling that of Plato in the Republic, for both posit “the mature, self-restrained male” as the central fgure in the union (“Subject” 222). Here I am indebted to the essays in Beneker and Tsouvala and those in Pomeroy, Plutarch’s Advice; also Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity 112–61; Nikolaidis, “Plutarch on Women” 27–88. I use Donald Russell’s translation of Advice to the Bride and Groom in Pomeroy, Plutarch’s Advice 5–13. See Claudian’s Fescennines for Honorius 4(14) and Epithalamium of Palladius and Celerinus; Di Meo 101–02. Montiglio (“Erotic Desire” 221, citing Lalanne 251)claims that the conclusions of Chariton’s and Xenophon’s novels, where the couple married before their adventures, entail a recovery and return, and those of Longus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, where they are married only after their adventures— a discovery and transformation. I would argue that all these novels end with discoveries and transformations, with adventures of Callirhoe and the Ephesiaka fguring how oftentimes matrimony and setting up a life together begins a process of discovering the considerable personal transformation needed for a successful marriage. Dressler 143, citing Nussbaum, “Incomplete Feminism” 298–301, who also posits that Seneca, as preserved in Jerome’s Against Jovinian, might have advocated a more complete feminism, where women strongly push back against all forms of marriage; also Gloyn 76–99. As a concession to a man lacking self-control to limit possible damage, Plutarch partially excuses the man who would visit prostitutes or otherwise indulge himself (Conjug.16). Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity 137–41. Mary Wollestonecraft expressed a rather similar opinion in the Introduction to her Vindication of the Rights of Women. Indeed, this story of young love, defance of their parents and bravery in the face of death due to service to reforming Spartan king resemble material from a novel; see Nikolaidis, “Plutarch on Women” 32–39; also Beneker. See Jones, Playing 31–32; Whitmarsh, “Greece” 272–73. For further details, see Di Meo 108; Jones, Playing 32–35. The Stoics Musonius Rufus, Antipater and Hierocles, while stressing harmony in marriage, chiefy saw marriage as reproducing the polis and the oikos, for which it is the fundamental building block; see Patterson 132 and 136; Jones, Playing 33–34. See the attack on love in Plutarch’s frg. 136 in Stob. 4.20.68 (Nikolaidis, “Plutarch’s Fragments” 143–44); see also Roskam; Wohl; Haynes 158. Dio of Prusa and Musonius Rufus generally disapproved of intercourse aimed at self-gratifcation; see Nussbaum, “Incomplete Feminism” 298–99; Houser; also Nikolaidis, “Plutarch on Women” 47–68. Various medical writers even saw sexual activity as physically harmful for men; Rousselle 5–23. As Christianity’s ideology of sexual self-control and virginity evolved, the commitment to virginity by a maiden and the assumption of celibacy by the married became an avenue, especially for women, for gaining infuence; see Cooper 68–91. Diog. Laert.7.130; see Wiles 35; Nussbaum, “Erōs” 77. Russell calls Advice a “mixture of moral austerity and natural sentiments” (Plutarch 90–92). Plutarch compares creating a successful marriage to one who manages to extract the sweet matter from a prickly asparagus (Conjug. 2; Di Meo 100–02), as

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130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137

138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146

147 148 149 150 151 152

153 154 155

the couple’s frst experiences of each other, especially the woman’s, might be disagreeable. Morales gives a fne discussion of the objectifying gaze (Vision). Jones, Playing 14–15; Egger, “Women” 265; Bowie, “Novels” 93–96. Foxhall 144–45; Johne 132–33 and nn. 6 and 7; also Bremen. Marshall 123; MacMullen, “Woman” 215–16; Lefkowitz 56–57; Haynes 27–28. On the Hellenistic and Republican “New Women,” see Tsouvala, citing Fantham et al. 136–83 and 216–43. As does Parthenope in the Metiochus and Parthenope Romance; Archistrates’ unnamed daughter attends dinner parties in the Apollonius King of Tyre. But even that friendship is given far fewer details than that of Chaereas and Polycharmus; Haynes 123–26. For example, Chariton’s Callirhoe makes her frst appearance at a festival to Aphrodite, and is sequestered right after her marriage to Chaereas (1.2); Xenophon’s Anthia likewise does not like to appear out of doors alone, especially as a free woman; see Haynes 54. Liviabella Furiani, “Di” 47–55. Such violence by fundamentally decent men is also seen in New Comedy, as, for example, in the Periceiromene and the Epitrepontes of Menander. This relative invisibility of mothers may arise in part because fathers are formidable fgures of authority and thus represent more ideal “blocking” fgures for a narrative, as well as refect androcentric attitudes; Egger, Women 119–38. Especially worthwhile is Janan, Politics. Winkler, Constraints 126; the notion of the “resisting reader” goes back to Fetterley. As it was for Freud, Frye and Lacan; see Lacan esp. 222 ff. Grube 51–86; Carson 41 and 153; on Plato, pleasure and illusion, see Moss. Euripides’ Phaedra (Hipp. 373–418) denies the ability for sheer will to control desire. Blundell 171; Dover; Salomon 210. Konstan 53; Goldhill (Foucault’s Virginity ix) notes the distinction between integritas (“physical wholeness”) and sanctitas (“holiness”). Thus (contra Ballengee 140) the disconnect in these texts lies not between the actual experience of the body and the public perception of its chastity or lack of it, but rather between erotic loyalty as defned by a type of intent, a general will to the Good (however fawed in actualization), and authentication by certain physical activities. Morales, Vision 129–30; Zeitlin, “Gendered Ambiguities” 122. For further discussion see Egger, “Women”; also Elsom. On male identifcation with the victim, see Ballengee 159–60, citing Clover, on the reception of horror flms. Consider how, while viewing Leukippe (apparently) being disemboweled, Kleitophon compares himself to Niobe (Ach. Tat. 3.15). Ballengee 137, citing Foucault, Care 189–232. On Classical theories of the gaze, see Simon; Barton 91–95; also Plut. Quaest. conv. 681a; Heliod. 3.7; Morgan, Ethiopian Story 416, n. 88. On sophisticated play with such concepts, see Goldhill, “Erotic Experience” 379–86. Augustine makes a similar point about the value of the diffculty of Scripture; see Williams 142. He seems to agree in De doctrina christiana that language is a fuid system of signs moving from one to another, only saved from the emptiness (which Lacan postulates) by being anchored in God. On nature, culture and education, particularly in D & C, see Herrmann; Epstein, “Education”; Repath, “Platonic Love” 99–122. On phantasia, see note 12 on p. 11 of the present work. Goodheart (2–3) cites in particular Kristeva 23 and Bersani ix–xii; our next section will discuss how, in Lacan’s formulation, true desire cannot be satisfed.

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156 Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet III, column II, line 10; see Heidel 41. 157 A common theme of school rhetorical exercise (suasoriae) is whether Alexander can endure any part of the world being unvisited or unconquered by him; Stoneman xxviii–xxix. 158 See Grube 105–12, discussing, among other passages, Pl. Phdr. 250c. 159 Penwill, “Slavish Pleasures”; Sandy, “Knowledge”; Schlam, “Curiosity”; Barton 85–91. 160 Barton 99, citing Foucault, Madness 18. 161 See Porter and Buchan; indeed, Lacan deeply engaged, and was informed by, Classical myth and literature; see Harris. 162 I have depended here on Badiou; Bowie, Lacan; Evans; Fink; Porter and Buchan; Miller; Janan, Politics and When. 163 There are many books on Lacan and flm studies; for a reasonably current one, see McGowan. 164 “Reality” being the world as we perceive, construct and make sense of, not the Kantian thing-in-itself. 165 The “consumptive gaze” is particularly tied to the male objectifcation of women; Morales called it “one of the most pervasive metaphors of the gaze in ancient literature” (Morales, Vision 33, citing Henry). 166 Lacan does believe in objective reality, although the conscious experience of reality is mediated by the mind’s cognitive structures, which cannot fully engage this objective reality. 167 Consider how possession of valued paideia is a form of the Lacanian Big Other. Our sophisticated texts implicitly ask: “What sort of pepaideumenos/ē are you?” Porter (“Ideals”) suggests that Longinus is training his readers so that their subjective experience of reading “sublime passages” will align with a role scripted for them and, in a sense, exterior to them, as pepaideumenoi/ai. 168 Lacan sees metonymy as forcing us to see a new relationship of a part to a whole, which thus changes the meaning of that whole, creating new understandings. 169 On this point Janan (When 68) cites Padel; see also Sissa.

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I will frst offer three consecutive chapters on the more ideal novels, Callirhoe, Daphnis and Chloe (D & C) and the Aithiopika, and then two chapters on the less ideal ironic-sardonic Leukippe and Kleitophon (L & K) and Metamorphoses. I frame my consideration of these ideal novels dialectically. Callirhoe is the most grounded in historiography, and its plot concerns major world-historical events centered on the marvelous child and near-avatar of the divine Callirhoe, while lacking explicit divine interventions. D & C, although having contemporary elements, refects the pastoral’s ahistorical world, but with a greater stress on divine machinations. Heliodorus’ Aithiopika provides a synthesis, where the gods have made the marvelous child Charikleia the focus of a world-historical development in a cosmos richly evocative of religious and philosophic concepts. But all three are similar as their protagonists, subject to various Words of various Fathers, after often transgressive behaviors, gain the standing to proclaim a newer, better Word of the Father.

Introduction Chariton’s Callirhoe1 is probably the earliest of the extant Greco-Roman novels, although by then the genre seems to have reached a certain maturity.2 Callirhoe resembles a historical novel,3 whose historical dimensions have been detailed.4 Chariton, as did later writers of the Second Sophistic, utilizes a wide expanse of Greek (perhaps even Latin) literary traditions, but with considerable freedom, artistry and even playfulness. Callirhoe’s reader may be uncertain about which interpretive paradigm to employ, as the novel alternates between the poles of hard history and mythical epic.5 Chaereas becomes a paradigmatic Greek literary protagonist by embodying a wide range of characters from Greek literature and myth, evoking the comic Chaereas as well as Alexander the Great, Nireus, Hippolytus, Hector, Odysseus, Protesilaus, Agamemnon, Theseus, Diomedes, Xenophon of Athens, Alcibiades, Achilles and other characters.6 Callirhoe similarly evokes Aphrodite, Artemis, Nemesis, Helen, Semele, Thetis, Medea and Ariadne, as well as the unnamed daughter of the historical Hermocrates who married DOI: 10.4324/9781003036647-3

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Dionysius I and, after being abused during an uprising against him, committed suicide (Plut. Dio 3.1–2). Each chapter on individual novels will present different vectors of the ideal. I locate Callirhoe’s utopian aspect in three areas: (1) Callirhoe depicts major events, motivated in canonical histories by familiar political causes (power, wealth, fame, etc.), being instead affected by erotic concerns7; having a historiographical pose, it offers a type of alternate history suggesting ideal potentials in the Greek past that could live again; (2) it is informed by the heroic protagonist’s coming-of-age/descent–ascent journey combined with other archetypes; and (3) the protagonists’ love manages to transition from passion at frst sight, through trials and failures, to a deeper, tested commitment, although both protagonists transgress standards of morality and sōphrosynē, making the novel seem “hardly ideal” (Whitmarsh, “Introduction” 6). Desire is not fatal, and Chaereas, desired and desiring, will gain the power to speak his own word of the father at Syracuse. This connects with how Callirhoe recalls tragic myths (the stories of Helen, Ariadne and Phaedra), but enjoys happier endings, as underscored by the assurance at 8.1.4, that what is to come will be “an antidote to the grim events” occurring before.8

Erotic history By Chariton’s time, the glory days of the ffth century had been mythologized. Hermocrates, too, had been frequently idealized in Greek rhetoric and literature (Billault, “De” 540–48; Bompaire 55–68). Thus, Chariton’s novel is set in a glorifed past in which greater things were possible, where superior virtues (including erotic virtues) could be located. In standard histories, civic assemblies consider major matters of state, and could be swayed by demagogues. But in Callirhoe, a regularly scheduled assembly concerns itself with the marriage of Chaereas and Callirhoe, with Eros acting the demagogue (1.1.11). When Chaereas frst sees Callirhoe, he departs like a hero (aristeus) fatally wounded, aligning with how his war with Artaxerxes presents a more successful replay of the Trojan War (Temmerman 106–07). Likewise, the whole Syracusan state participates in Callirhoe’s recovery (3.3–4). Miletus’ temple of Homonoia is mentioned in reference to the custom of soon-to-be-married couples going there (3.2.16), implying that marital harmony is the most necessary civic harmony (Alvares, “Chariton’s Erotic History” 620). The Great King summons Mithridates to trial because he was threatening the marriage of a noble provincial (4.6.6–7). The trial over Callirhoe’s marriage itself becomes a cause célèbre at Babylon (5.4.1). Later, the Great King behaves like older lover of New Comedy, showing embarrassment over his infatuation with Callirhoe (6.3). The Syracusans’ excellence is manifested not only by their repulse of Athenian aggression, but also by their devotion to love, which, in turn, allows them to produce and cultivate two outstanding embodiments of love and desire, Callirhoe

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and Chaereas, whose successes equal or surpass those achievements found in standard histories and duplicate famous Hellenic triumphs. Chaereas returns to Syracuse as the evident successor to both Hermocrates and Ariston. Callirhoe has her own quasi-political triumphs. And the Syracusans seem poised to succeed the Athenians as the new center of Hellenic power.

The archetypes Callirhoe, as it narrates the protagonists’ comings of age, presents Frye’s elements of the descent into a lower world, the protagonists’ adventures there and the ascent from that world. The descent/underworld journey begins with Callirhoe’s false death and capture by pirates, while Chaereas’ begins with his leap into the sea while attempting suicide (3.5). Chaereas learns of Callirhoe’s abduction and goes off to recover her (his quest objective); symbolically, Callirhoe has been taken to deadlands, and Chaereas travels there, too, a motif reinforced by his false death, funeral and cenotaph. Both Chaereas and Callirhoe cross waters to enter a vast land, a virtual underworld, where their innocence, identity and life are challenged. Their loss of identity occurs in their changes of status, frst into slaves. Note how Theron claims that Callirhoe is from Sybaris (1.12.8 and 2.1.9), a ruse she goes along with initially. Magical doubles occur in this virtual underworld, such as the golden statue of Callirhoe (3.5.3)9 and the funeral image of Chaereas (4.11.1). Magical items sometimes link characters with elements of their former identities (Frye, Secular Scripture 117), such as Chaereas’ cameo used by the debating Callirhoe (2.11). Chaereas and Polycharmus suffer the confnement, abuse and near death—customary trials endured in that lower world. Symbolically, the protagonists’ travels to Babylon represent a journey into the lower depths of this underworld to confront its very lord, from whom Chaereas must rescue Callirhoe. The old priestess (3.6.5) and Mithridates loosely correspond to the usual helpers who aid the quest protagonist. The demonic trial, where one is exposed and all secrets are laid bare with an accompanying perversion of justice, is found in the trial,10 where Callirhoe’s bigamous marriage to Dionysius becomes the talk of Babylon. The underworld can also test the protagonist with deceptive pleasure, and Callirhoe, in her marriage to Dionysius, is nearly trapped in this bower of bliss. She is similarly tested by the propositions of the Great King through his eunuch Artaxates. The instant when Callirhoe truly breaks the underworld spell and vindicates herself is when she rejects Artaxates’ threats; Chariton notes that at this moment, Callirhoe would not have wanted even a marriage with Zeus (6.7.12). Chariton’s adaptation of the Ariadne, Theseus and Dionysos11 myths also refects on Callirhoe’s testing. During the funeral, the supposedly dead Callirhoe looks like sleeping Ariadne (1.6.2); later, Chaereas, discovering Callirhoe’s empty tomb, thought that a god had taken her, as Zeus took Semele or Dionysos took Ariadne (3.3.4–5); the similarity of “Dionysius” to “Dionysos” is uncanny (Scourfeld, “Chaereas” 301). Later, Chariton

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declares how her fame had spread over Asia and “the name of Callirhoe had come to the attention of the Great King as one excelling even Ariadne or Leda” (4.1.8). Callirhoe recalls Ariadne, who was loved by somebody initially hateful to her father (as Theseus was to Minos) and was then betrayed and eventually abducted by a near-god among men who promises her bliss (Artaxerxes). But in this revision, her frst lover (Chaereas) makes amends to the betrayed beloved; son-in-law and father-in-law are reconciled, and sonin-law becomes a reformer of a polis, as Theseus was. As noted, Callirhoe appears as an apotheosis of a goddess, especially of Aphrodite,12 corresponding to the pattern of a “god among mortals.”13 Indeed, Callirhoe is more often compared to a goddess than heroines in the other ideal novels, while Chaereas lacks such comparisons (Temmerman 47). When Callirhoe frst appears in public, she is compared to a vision of Artemis that manifests itself to hunters in the wild, and many present immediately perform proskynēsis (1.1.16). Dionysius, when he frst encounters Callirhoe at Aphrodite’s shrine, assumes she is that goddess (2.3.6–7). Later, Statira will mistake Callirhoe for a goddess, and the Great King will wonder whether she is divine (Alvares, “Hidden Magus”). The boatmen who transport Callirhoe to Miletus are awestruck, as if their passenger was Aphrodite, and likewise the crowds at Miletus believe some Nereid had risen from the sea or that a goddess had appeared at Dionysius’ estate (3.2.14–16). Later, Dionysius imagines that a god might try to seduce Callirhoe (3.9.5); at Callirhoe’s wedding, the crowds shout: “Aphrodite is the bride!” (ἡ Ἀφροδίτη γαμεῖ [3.2.17]). Later, Dionysius marvels seeing Callirhoe with her child (3.8.6).14 Callirhoe, Aphrodite’s quasi-avatar, conducts an erotic anabasis from Syracuse to Babylon, dominating the leading men of Sicily, Ionia and Persia;15 rumor races ahead, comparing her to Artemis and golden Aphrodite. Whole cities pour out to see her as if she were a goddess (4.7.5–7). Callirhoe contains a dialogue about empire building (Connors), but its realworld conqueror is Callirhoe. Finally, when Callirhoe returns home, the Syracusans compare her to Aphrodite rising from the sea (8.6.11). A related archetype is “Goddess Forced to Associate with Mortals/Marriage of the Fertility Goddess,” as Chaereas manages to gain marriage with a virtual goddess. Note Aphrodite is said to have given Callirhoe to Chaereas, as she gave Helen to Paris. Callirhoe is like Syracuse’s living Palladium,16 the embodiment of divine favor, and she is referred to as an agalma (1.1.1), as is Charikleia. Accordingly, the announcement of Callirhoe’s death (1.5.1) is likened to the fall of a city,17 and she, like a notable political fgure, is given a state funeral attended by all segments of the population (1.6.3–4). When it is discovered that she is alive, all Syracuse joins the search for her, and upon her recovery, the city now restored, rejoices. As discussed earlier, elements of Burkert’s “Withdrawal-Devastation-Return of a God” and Sowa’s “Rape of the Goddess” patterns also appear, with many details similar to elements of the myths of Demeter and Kore and their mysteries,18 providing idealizing

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undertones of a profound myth about the conquest of baleful powers and the creation of a new form of life with substantial benefts to humanity. As noted, the couples’ trials prove the enduring stability of a love based frst merely on strong erotic attraction. The protagonists’ sufferings and travels also connect to the “wanderings caused by angry god” pattern. Callirhoe sees herself as being persecuted by Aphrodite—the common mythic fate of mortals who receive (however unwillingly) honors normally received by gods. Chariton directly ties Chaereas’ struggles to Aphrodite’s wrath (8.1.3). While he recalls the Chaereas of New Comedy (e.g., his often unheroic passivity), Chaereas also possesses an arrogance and jealousy which turns to violence and which makes Callirhoe uncomfortable (8.1.15). Consider how, when Xenophon of Ephesus adapts Chariton, he makes Habrocomes’ arrogance, and subsequent regret, explicit (Xen. Ephes. 1.1–2). Note Chariton’s Eros considers resistance an act of hybris (2.4.5; see also Ach. Tat. 2.5.2). Chaereas’ boastings and assumption of imperial glory may indicate a more excessive, even potentially tyrannical personality, such as manifested by Athens’ Alcibiades (Smith, Greek Identity 333–90). Yet the Babylonian trial also marks the beginning of the resumption of their true identities, as Callirhoe and Chaereas frst see each other after a long separation, and Chaereas is symbolically raised from the dead (Alvares, “Hidden Magus”). The death struggle with the antagonist, another paradigmatic element, occurs in Chaereas’ violent battle with Persia, which he undertakes expecting to die (7.1.5–7). In romance, all cannot escape, and a substitute for the hero is sometimes destroyed. Thus, the Egyptian king must perish, just as Aeneas in Book 5 must leave some Trojans behind before the fnal push onward to Italy. These events lead to Chaereas’ regaining of Callirhoe. Their reunion is described in Odyssean terms, reminding us of the famous Homeric tag: ἀσπάσιοι λέκτροιο παλαιοῦ θεσμὸν ἵκοντο (Hom. Od. 23.296; cf. Charit. 8.1.7). Odysseus, having defeated the suitors, beds Penelope in a type of hieros gamos. Chaereas, having captured Artaxerxes’ queen, makes love to Callirhoe in the King’s own bed. Like Odysseus and Penelope, they tell each other their stories. It is suspected that Odysseus edits out his love affairs with Circe and Calypso, and here, Callirhoe gives an edited account of her time with the King, to which Chaereas declares that he has not shamed her, but flled land and sea with her trophies, underscoring that this is Callirhoe’s story, not Chaereas’. Escaping from the Persian underworld, Chaereas brings back a host with him, a type of harrowing of Hell. With the couple returned and new citizens incorporated into Syracuse, the community is now restored at a higher level. The creation of a new community is often thematized by marriages that often end the more comic romances—even the Aeneid, with the death of Turnus, must imply that Aeneas will soon marry Lavinia. Thus at the end, Chaereas marries off his sister to Polycharmus. Chaereas’ labors, as well as

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those of other heroes in Greek ideal novels, which involve penitential suffering in pursuit of a clearly superior woman, recall those more spiritualized quests of medieval romance, whose heroes suffer in service to ladies who draw them to a higher level. Considering Callirhoe’s status as the stand-in for Aphrodite, a fundamental power that can even overrule Tyche,19 Chaereas returns to Syracuse having attained heroic honor through his deeds in service to his beloved and also having been converted into a faith in erotic devotion which he had held only superfcially. More about this is given below. The quest archetype connects to patterns of initiation ritual, and Callirhoe delineates Chaereas’ transition from ephebe to full adulthood.20 Chaereas’ character has been widely disparaged, and his sudden reform in Book 7 seemed forced.21 Chaereas is more Jason than Achilles and seems prone to youthful vices (1.2.6), being suicidal, overly emotional, jealous and angry,22 and unready to face life’s challenges or to endure the confict between desire and duty.23 He is easily tricked by Callirhoe’s suitors, Mithridates and Dionysius. Note how Chaereas’ father is hurt (1.3.1 and 1.6.3) and seems to have become feeble of heart when Chaereas is about to leave (3.4.4), so different from the Ariston, Hermocrates’ great rival. This fts the mythic paradigm (Dowden, “Fluctuating Meanings” 221–43) in which the young hero has a weakened or incapacitated father. It is not until he joins the Egyptian rebellion (7.1.7–8; Polycharmus’ idea, not his own) that he demonstrates his heroic potential, both in actions and in new rhetorical abilities (Temmerman 88–97); tellingly, his frst act of self-control involves a desire to die, although that desire is connected to his “jealousy, self-pity, and sense of victimhood” (93). But even after he has regained Callirhoe, Chaereas remains a problematical leader, for example, handing over the feet to Polycharmus during the dangerous voyage back to Syracuse. Through such passivity and emotionalism, Chaereas reveals virtue in suffering and permits the gods to favor the couple by (indirectly) working out solutions. Callirhoe also recalls the legends of Troy (Laplace, “Légendes”). Callirhoe is like a goddess and is mistaken for one, and Helen originally was a Spartan tree goddess (Rose, Handbook 191). Like Helen, she is from a prominent Dorian city and has many contentious suitors. Callirhoe leaves her Greek homeland to become the wife in a bigamous marriage with a much richer Easterner, and Chaereas’ journey to recover her evokes attempts to recover Helen. Perhaps, most importantly, she manifests the power of Aphrodite (often unwillingly—again like Helen) in this world and its history. But Callirhoe, of course, is precisely Helen’s opposite in her true loyalty to her former husband, and in this narrative, godlike beauty is not joined to erotic disloyalty. The ending of this erotic struggle is not ultimately tragic, as the Trojan War was for Trojans and Greeks.24 Yet like Helen, Callirhoe is also a historical force of chaos, a Nemesis, which is let out of the bag and returned to it. Notice how Callirhoe emerges out of seclusion and, at the

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end, having served her (more positive) world-historical purpose, goes back into seclusion. Chariton details how Callirhoe moves from being a girl of limited experience, easily manipulated, to a woman who gains more control of others and of her own life. Such development corresponds to the presupposition that such characters are born with innate excellences, which need to become operational through paideia or circumstances, which can likewise suppress them. A major turning point is Callirhoe’s replay of the Medea myth, where readers observe her personality development through moments of internal debate and choice. Having beaten her stomach to abort the child, she later likens herself to one worse than Medea; she is clearly cast as a tragic heroine (Temmerman 62), but here Medea’s tragic outcome is radically revised. Callirhoe initially wants to abort the child because its loss of eugeneia due to a slavish birth is unthinkable; recall that Jason tells Medea how his second marriage will allow him the resources to raise their children as befts their rank. Medea cannot balance hatred of Jason and the love of her children. Callirhoe must balance fear of the child’s servile status against her love of child and Chaereas. This is why the dream of Chaereas (2.9.6) is crucial; since the child in theory belonged to the father, it is Chaereas’ choice for Callirhoe to spare his child. Like Euripides’ Medea, Callirhoe here is a profoundly divided self, and negotiating that aspect of life is one of the major steps toward maturity.25 Callirhoe then must make a further choice between her adherence to moral norms and her love for her child. In her debate on whether to marry Dionysius, since she has decided the child will live, both the unborn child and Chaereas get determining votes, but Chariton suggests that the choice to marry Dionysius is a necessity arising from the frst decision (5.1.1). But matters are ambiguous; while mother’s love is presented as a central virtue (2.9.1 and 2.10.8), Callirhoe shows few such feelings after her dramatic debate concerning abortion (Egger, Women 333). And when she does indicate the signifcance of the (still nameless) child, she concentrates on the child’s lineage, its potential status, how it may return to Syracuse and, most interestingly, how it will reconcile its parents (2.9.5). When Callirhoe suspects Chaereas is lost, she thanks Aphrodite that through the child, she retains an image of her husband (3.8.8). And the lack of any lament from Callirhoe over such a separation from the child is in stark contrast to the frenzied grief of the Persian women at Callirhoe’s departure (8.4.9). I agree that there is no truly satisfying explanation for why Chariton, the fction writer, makes Callirhoe so easily give up her child and why Chaereas accepts this outcome,26 but I favor an explanation that (1) sees Callirhoe’s love almost existentially focused on Chaereas, with the child’s value mostly in relation to him; (2) connects with the Kore archetype, with the child representing Kore’s permanent connection with Hades; (3) suggests that child will be a future Syracusan leader who will combine the best of East and West; and (4) reveals the deluded “success” of Dionysius. Note how later Chariton asserts that what made the sight of Callirhoe and child

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particularly striking was that no poet or artist “has represented Athena or Artemis with a baby in her arms” (3.8.6). These are two virgin goddesses, often associated with purity, fguring how Callirhoe has somehow remained “pure” with respect to her moral nature, despite her arrangement with Dionysius; here, observe how Dionysius, seeing her, prays to Nemesis, implicitly recognizing his wrongdoing. Chariton’s romance, as the story of Syracuse and its leading citizens,27 conforms to Frye’s fourth-phase romance; the idealness of Syracuse has been proven by Hermocrates’ defeat of Athens, as well as by its ability to produce such a superlative couple. The city’s excellence must be protected and even extended, as fgured in the struggles of Chaereas, and especially of Callirhoe, to safeguard their fdelity and moral purity and in the implications of their child’s future. Being the children of the frst and second men of Syracuse, they are marked out as Syracuse’s future rulers. Their child, whose excellent upbringing and return is insisted upon (2.9.5 and 8.7.12) and whose future history is compared to mythical heroes like Cyrus and Amphion (2.9.5), promises further greatness for Syracuse (Alvares, “Chariton’s Erotic History” 625). The child’s history recalls the marvelous child pattern: the child’s parents are of the highest rank, the child’s birth is problematical for the mother, its life is threatened (Callirhoe contemplates abortion), the child is exiled from his natural birthright or home to be raised by strangers (Dionysius), and the child will one day discover his true identity and return to his home and to his proper position and, presumably, renew his people. Thus, the outcome of the couple’s adventures not only maintains Syracuse’s exemplary present, but also provides for its future. Through references to past and future events, the novel presents the more panoptic perspective of Frye’s fourth phase, where the adventures and the fnal results are revealed as part of a greater order of events.

History, politics and ideology Callirhoe refects the sociopolitical circumstances of its era, various mythic patterns—ideal, tragic and comic—and dreams, with some concrete aspects, of a more ideal political world, as well as views which made accommodation with the ruling power acceptable. Aphrodisias was well integrated within the Roman web of power, and Chariton as ὑπογραφεύς to the rhetor Athenagoras28 could have been personally involved in political and legal matters.29 Aphrodisias itself, originally a non-Greek city, took a multifaceted approach in depicting its cultural origins; for example, an Aphrodisian relief shows the Asiatic Ninus dressed as a Roman along with Semiramis and Gordius, the legendary Phrygian king, sacrifcing before an altar (Erim 100–01; Edwards, Religion 34), all suggesting a certain pride and continuity with that past.30 Further, Callirhoe presents a virtual survey of political systems, as well as a type of alternate history.

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As noted, Hellenistic historians had played loose with historical facts and added material, such as scenes evoking dramas or elaborate ekphrases, aimed at entertainment—items which Chariton employs less than some Hellenistic writers. While the depth of realism is not great and contains glaring lapses regarding historical fact,31 Chariton flls his scenes with the sort of items that the reader would have expected, creating a sense of general plausibility.32 The gnomai, generalizing comments and implied “lessons from history” give it a didactic dimension. Historians differed on what could be the proper matter of historia; note that when Dionysius suspects that Callirhoe is really a Nymph or Nereid, he asserts: “Some moments of destiny seize hold of even gods and compel them to associate with mortals. So the poets and historians tell us” (2.4.8–9). For Veyne, much of Greek history-writing is not about recovering precise facts, but creating a plausible story,33 and Chariton’s text has enough verisimilitude to achieve this task. Stadter considers Xenophon’s idealization of Persia “essentially utopian, like Plato’s Republic. It describes not what has been, but what ought to be” (“Fictional Narrative” 467). Callirhoe resembles Xenophon’s Cyropaedia as a historical fction which implies important lessons about the potentials of the past and the present.34 As noted, the Greek past of Hermocrates had acquired some properties of mythic time. The events of Chariton’s pseudohistory, being patterned on real historical events (or what would have passed for real historical events), convey a sense of the possible, which corresponds to Porter’s notion of the inspirational value of iconic passages of literature or remains of the glorious Hellenic past. As Xenophon suggested, there were potentials in Persian culture and particularly in Persian individuals (Cyrus) for producing a more utopian state—potentials which might be actualized in his own era—so Chariton, building upon the idealization of Syracuse, creates a fctional epoch when potentials for a better society were activated, thus presenting a dream that Chariton’s readers might create this more ideal world. Xenophon and Thucydides exerted important infuences upon Chariton who begins his novel by identifying himself in a way that recalls canonical historians (especially Thuc. 1.20–22) but quickly lets the reader know his work will be a πάθος ἐρωτικὸν (1.1).35 Chariton’s alternate history will combine the lessons of historical writing (as defned by Hellenistic practice) and the pleasures of amatory fction, with some epic daring thrown in. Chaereas and Callirhoe are destined to rule, as is their child. The polities encountered provide a virtual survey of various other political systems as context: in brief, Callirhoe’s suitors represent the Greek tyrants, bandits such as Theron embody the prehistoric period (cf. Thuc. 1.5–6) and Odysseus’ world,36 as well as those outlaw elements opposed to the social order,37 the Athenians represent oppressive democracy, the Ionians the compliant (but luxurious) subject state, not a Greek democracy but a form of benevolent and popular aristocracy (Alvares, “Some Political and Ideological Dimensions” 130), the Egyptians the rebellious and more nationalistic

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subject state, and the Persians autocratic imperial power. As one goes east, wealth, luxury and idleness increase, as does autocracy and the infuence of slaves,38 culminating in the eunuch Artaxates, who has vast infuence, and Artaxerxes, whose moral and political failures are linked to a lifestyle of harmful idleness and less disciplined pleasures, while democracy and human rights decline. Opposed to this is Syracuse; to understand Callirhoe’s ideal (if qualifed) presentation of Syracuse, let us frst consider Chariton’s depiction of some political and social realities of his Ionia and Persia. As Syracuse offers a (partially) ideal image of guided democracy, and Athens suggested an independent yet excessive (but accomplished) democracy, Miletus offers the model of a benefcent aristocracy and that of a subject state. Miletus is part of a Persian satrapy,39 as Miletus was part of a Roman province in Chariton’s era, which also had strong associations with Aphrodisias (Jones, “Hellenistic History” 162–63). Its leaders, epitomized by Dionysius, are cooperative subjects; indeed, Dionysius commands a contingent in Artaxerxes’ army (6.9.2). In many ways, Callirhoe’s Miletus and its leading man, Dionysius, belong less to the ffth century BCE than to Chariton’s lifetime, which provides context for the pathetic outcome of Dionysius’ story. Chariton’s Greek readers could fnd in Dionysius’ life and career refections on some fundamental realities, political and otherwise, of the lives and worldly aspirations of aristocrats of their own cities.40 Dionysius’ estate with its numerous specialized slaves (2.3.3), his lavish displays of wealth while traveling (2.2.3–4) and the public feasts he puts on when getting married (3.2.10–11) and when Callirhoe’s child is born (3.7.1) recall the practices of Roman-era Greek elites. Dionysius is the frst man in Ionia in wealth, lineage and culture (1.12.6–7, 2.10.4 and 4.4.3), qualities appearing in the literature and honorary decrees of the imperial period, including Aphrodisian inscriptions,41 and his paideia is insisted upon.42 Dionysius is described as “magnifcent in nature” (2.3.4) and is called “benefactor” by the stratēgos Bias (4.5.8).43 Dionysius as refned civic benefactor recalls those leading citizens of Greek East who augmented their honor by large public donations and who boasted of their connections to imperial power, such as Aphrodisias’ C. Julius Zoilus (Alvares, “Perspective” 10, n. 17; Reynolds 156–64). Dionysius’ powerful position had other well-known equivalents in Chariton’s era; from the time of the Flavians onward, there were increasing opportunities for Greeks to hold high positions in the Roman empire. Those scenes wherein Mithridates and Pharnaces call upon Dionysius and he, in turn, entertains them and when Pharnaces, Dionysius’ friend (4.6.4), petitions the Great King on his behalf44 recall the interactions of the Greek elite with high Roman offcials. Dionysius’ Milesian house, luxuriously built to receive the Great King (1.13.1), embodies his coziness with the ruling power.45 Dionysius possesses many fne personal qualities, and he endeavors to act properly, and would rather starve himself to death than compel Callirhoe to

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marry him (3.1.1). Nevertheless, Dionysius does not maintain the proper loyalty to his deceased wife, failing at a critical moment when her memory is becoming of true comfort to him (2.2).47 His considerable jealousy ruins him. Dionysius’ concern for justice is markedly inferior to Syracusan attitudes (Helms 79–81 and 124; Balot 148–50), and this lack of concern for justice, tied to vast wealth, is characteristic of Ionia (1.11.7–8). When Callirhoe reveals her origins and begs Dionysius, in the name of their shared Hellenic culture (2.5.11), to help, and he promises to do so (2.5.11–12), Dionysius instead delays and unleashes Plangon and her conspiracies (2.6.4–5 and 2.7.6). In his imagined prosecution by Hermocrates, Dionysius is quite aware of his wrongdoing (3.2.7–9). Dionysius later embraces Phocas for his destruction of Chaereas’ ship,48 and at Babylon, heading off to fght for Artaxerxes, he lies to Chaereas about the King’s decision about Callirhoe (7.1.3–4). Dio of Prusa’s career49 illustrates well the mix of lofty paideia, civic benefaction, along with dishonest and illegal activities associated with well-respected aristocrats in the Roman era. A central theme of Callirhoe is the “supremacy of the rule of law over inequality and tyranny” (Hunter, “History” 1061; Ruiz Montero, “Chariton” 1038), and various passages detail despotism’s lawlessness; the tyrant of Acragas explains: “. . . it is by cunning rather than by force we became rulers [τυραννίδας]” (1.2.5). Persia’s leaders, while recognizing correct standards,50 equate power with right; thus Chariton’s explanation of Artaxates’ stunned reaction to Callirhoe’s refusal: “Brought up under rigid despotism he could not believe anything impossible for the king or even himself” (6.5.10). Dionysius clearly falls short of Syracusan standards, and a Greek reader could connect Dionysius’ wealth, aristocratic lifestyle and lack of democratic constraints to his questionable behavior. As the eunuch Artaxates balefully infuenced the Great King, Dionysius’ slaves, in turn, exert a harmful infuence upon their master. As in Persia the categories of slave and free were quite confused, these categories are blurred in Ionia, as indicated by Leonas’ house, like that of a free person (1.13.2). Further, Dionysius accepts his status as the Great King’s slave and performs proskynēsis before the royal eunuch (5.3.11). Such abject servitude would be unfavorably viewed by many of Chariton’s readers.51 And despite Dionysius’ power and benefactions, the Milesians lack the political freedom of the Athenians and Syracusans which is the Greek ideal.52 The Greek elites preferred to picture their regimes as democratic, whatever the reality.53 A somewhat similar evocation of a democratic ideal is observed at Aphrodisias.54 Chariton’s picture of Syracuse presents vital democratic interaction between its leader, Hermocrates, the members of the Boulē, the dēmos and even a humble fsherman (3.4.11–12). Yet there is no evidence of democratic processes at Miletus. Note that Dionysius lacks the Milesians’ support55 and even love; as at Syracuse (but even more so), there are vast public celebrations of events in the life of Dionysius and Callirhoe by the citizens of Miletus and Ionia (although Callirhoe’s presence is a prime

90 Chariton’s Callirhoe impetus), and such public celebrations recall the public spectacles honoring members of the Roman emperor’s household. Syracuse’s Hermocrates sought the approval of and accepted advice from his fellow Syracusans; instead of portraying more egalitarian interaction between Dionysius and the Milesians, Chariton depicts Dionysius at a symposium (4.5.7) where he entertains the most outstanding men in the community. Consider, too, how Dionysius turns to his friend the Persian satrap (who had invited him to many banquets) for assistance (4.6.2)56 and Dionysius’ role as a functionary of the Persian empire. Thus, Chariton’s Miletus presents an ideal of aristocratic government in which the leading men are united under the rule of their “frst man” Dionysius, whose status is tied to his relationship to Persian power (Alvares, “Some Political and Ideological Dimensions” 130). Chariton’s depiction of Dionysius’ social and political life refects defning characteristics of aristocratic rule in Chariton’s time, when democratic processes had withered, as well as the natural tendencies of local and cooperative functionaries within the administration of an alien power. Consider too how Chariton’s text undercuts Dionysius’ achievements and implies delusion in his willing accommodation with Persia. At the trial in Babylon, although Dionysius points out the Great King’s close supervision of his subordinates (5.6.4), he gets no justice.57 He performs brilliantly during the Egyptian rebellion, causing the Egyptian king’s suicide. Accordingly, the reformed King grants him Callirhoe and later makes Dionysius his offcial friend (7.5.15). But in the end, Dionysius is left raising a child he mistakenly believes his own, whom he must one day send away, probably following Callirhoe’s instructions never to marry again (8.4.5 and 8.1.15) and cherishing her mere statue. And Dionysius himself fnally declares that both jealousy and Babylon have ruined him (8.5.15). Dionysius “has to settle for the Persian happiness of great political power, rather than the Greek ideal of homonoia,” with the implication that the popular ideal of many of the Greek elite was, to say the least, problematical (Hunter, “History” 1062). Chariton’s depiction of Persia, fundamentally plausible (by novelistic standards), is largely constructed from Classical and Hellenistic sources for Persian history and culture, including drama. These details are combined with anachronisms that describe Persian administration in Greco-Roman terms.58 The superiority of Greeks over barbarians is a persistent theme, but this superiority is qualifed.59 Chariton also reproduces idealizing perspectives on the Great King which refect Stoic and Cynic philosophy, passages which hold signifcant implications about the realities of imperial power, Roman as well as Persian. Persia contains the expected satrapies administered by satraps and leaders of dependent kingdoms (ἡγεμόνες [6.8.4]), such as Dionysius.60 Some satrapies are ruled with the cooperation of native aristocrats (e.g., Ionia), while others simmer in revolt, such as Egypt. Satraps conspire against each other and contemplate rebellion, and the King must guard against his underlings.61 Callirhoe’s Persian frontier is imagined as it was for

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contemporary Parthians; the manner in which Mithridates and Pharnaces call upon Dionysius and are entertained by him recalls interactions between high Roman imperial offcials and local Greek elites.62 Indeed, Mithridates’ estate is managed like a Roman-era plantation with an ergostolos (4.2.2; the Greek translation of a Roman term), and there slaves are crucifed, a Roman practice. In Babylon, one sees the factionalism common to Greek cites, as well as typical divisions between rulers and the ruled. Thus, all Babylon is divided over Mithridates’ trial: the satraps support their fellow governor Mithridates, while Dionysius retains the “sympathy of the common people” (5.4.1); the Persian ladies likewise hope that a trial will damage Callirhoe’s reputation, while the majority of women pray that Callirhoe’s renown will be enhanced (5.4.2–3).63 Later, when they come before the Great King to determine who is Callirhoe’s husband, Dionysius is escorted by the Persian nobles, while the common populace follow Chaereas (6.2.1–2). The King, when he receives Pharnaces’ letter, consults with his advisors, and conducts the subsequent trial in the palace, as did Roman emperors,64 and likewise uses close associates to help adjudicate important cases (5.4.5– 6), recalling the imperial conventus.65 There are no popularly elected jurors as at Syracuse, and the accused fearfully enter the royal courtroom (5.4.7). The ensuing trial combines traditional notions of the Persian court66 and the Great King’s judicial role with generic Greek legal practice.67 Through such Greco-Roman infected detail, the reader can recognize the experience of Greeks and other non-Romans within the system of Roman jurisprudence; this trial’s conduct and problematical outcome reinforce the traditional equation between judicial misconduct and despotic government. Consider how Dionysius in Babylon is quite isolated and vulnerable compared to Mithridates, who understands the court’s machinations;68 Dionysius acknowledges that his standing in the trial is not on the “same footing” (ἐξ ἴσου), compared to that of Mithridates (5.6.4), who later (5.7.1) makes the usual accusation about lying, tricky Greeks—even as he is preparing an elaborate courtroom ruse. Even Queen Statira calls the Greeks “braggarts” (ἀλαζόνες [5.3.2]); also Schwartz, Courtroom Scenes 93–99). In Persia, the Great King is supreme lawgiver, army commander, judge and religious offcial, and his authority is summed up at 6.7.3: “for no one can demur when the king commands.” Artaxerxes is considered a god among his people (6.7.12 and 6.3.8) and is descended from the Sun (6.1.10). His quasidivinity is linked to the worship of the “royal gods” (6.2.2 and 5.7.10). Like the Roman emperor, the Great King is protected by his own Tychē (5.6.8),69 which echoes the cult of the Roman emperor’s genius. Traditional Greek culture drew a sharp line between slave and free; even the Persian nobles consider themselves slaves of the Great King (5.2.2), as he considers his subjects (4.6.8, 6.1.11 and 4.6.4). As noted, slaves in Chariton are a bad infuence, and thus, Artaxates has a corrupting effect upon his royal master.70 Recall how, ever since the Julio-Claudians, freedmen and even slaves of the household of Caesar, such as Claudius’ Pallas and Narcissus, wielded considerable power.

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More positively, the idealization of the Great King goes back to Aeschylus and Herodotus and continued into the Roman imperial period, and Callirhoe’s Artaxerxes partially recalls the ideal king of Stoic–Cynic philosophy.71 Statira calls Artaxerxes χρηστός (5.9.3), and the trial’s audience applaud “the restraint and justice of the king” (5.4.8). Dionysius claims to take courage in the justice of Artaxerxes and the laws he equally guards for all (5.6.4–5) and refers to the King’s duty to uphold strict behavior standards among his subordinates (5.6.1–4). Artaxerxes shows considerable awareness of his responsibility to uphold his laws, as he harshly rejects Artaxates’ suggestion that he seize Callirhoe (6.3.7–8), and he powerfully struggles against his passion. But fnally, passion compromises Artaxerxes’ standards; his concern for proper government and justice, coupled with sensuality, corresponds to a tradition found in Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes.72 The Great King’s decision to summon Mithridates to trial (4.6.7) and later to require Callirhoe’s presence during trial, although she legally has no reason to be there (as Dionysius points out at 5.4.11), his feigning of a dream from the “royal gods” in order to put off a promised judgment (6.2.2), his acceptance of Artaxerxes’ sophistic reasons that he can both have Callirhoe and not violate his own laws on adultery (6.4.7–8) and his willingness, if needed, to use force to seize her (6.7.2), are all linked to erotic passion. Persia’s leaders, despite an acknowledgment of correct standards, grant their rulers limitless power. Without these restraints, passion or whim would naturally override a ruler’s self-discipline. In his trial speech, Dionysius declares that Mithridates, upon meeting Callirhoe, acted “not like a friend or a decent and respectable man, such as you wish those to be to whom you entrust the rule of your cities, but showed himself lewd and presumptuous” (5.6.6), connecting lawless behavior to tyranny (Ruiz Montero, “Chariton” 1038). The decision to bring Mithridates, Dionysius and Callirhoe to Babylon came against Artaxerxes’ better judgment when alone as “wine and darkness played upon the King’s mind” (4.6.6). Chariton imagines that Artaxates was “grateful to the war for having cut short this passion of the king which had been fed by idleness” (6.9.4). Idleness, of course, is one of the standard explanations for how debilitating love arises (Toohey 269–75). Passion, not kept under proper control, causes the King and his counselors to ignore Dionysius’ proper arguments concerning Callirhoe’s presence and for the Great King to violate the laws on marriage (5.6.1 and 6.3.7), as well as to fnally accept the eunuch’s sophistries about Callirhoe’s marital status. Finally, Artaxerxes makes the hunt (in Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes [53], Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and elsewhere a school of excellence for Persian royalty),73 into an opportunity for lavish erotic display where, instead of chasing animals, he pursues an absent Callirhoe. Under Love’s compulsions, Artaxerxes’ self-control breaks down; under Artaxates’ infuence, he begins to act even more unjustly; fttingly, at the moment his self-control is

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notably compromised, the Egyptian rebellion erupts. Subsequently, frustration at the King’s unjust judgments makes Chaereas join the Egyptian rebels.75 There are suggestive parallels between Phaedra’s transgressive love for Hippolytus and Artaxerxes’ love for Callirhoe (Scourfeld, “Chaereas” 302– 03). I have mentioned how Callirhoe’s travels through Asia recall a divine anabasis. Phaedra’s love is part of Aphrodite’s revenge against Hippolytus for not honoring her. During the month of celebrations Artaxerxes proclaims, he sacrifces magnifcently for the frst time to Eros, frequently seeking Aphrodite’s intercession (6.2.4). The Great King claims that “Long ago I heard in stories and poems who Love is, and that he rules all the gods, even Zeus himself. However, I did not believe that in a match with me anyone could come out on top” (6.3.2). As Artaxerxes struggles with his passion, Artaxates says: “For you alone, master, can overcome even a god” (6.3.9). Artaxerxes is like Xenophon’s Habrocomes, whose arrogance must be humbled by Eros (Xen. Ephes. 1.4), except the Great King is the most powerful ruler on earth. During the subsequent hunt, Artaxerxes’ fantasies evoking Callirhoe, Artemis and hunts on Mt. Taygetus (6.4.6) recall Phaedra’s deranged hunting delusions (Eur. Hipp. 215–30). Of course, Artaxates plays a very similar role to Phaedra’s nurse in encouraging Artaxerxes’ love, including a reference to a pharmakon (6.3.6; see Hipp. 479). Thus, Artaxerxes’ lapses can be explained by Persian despotism and Aphrodite’s irresistible machinations. In some ways, Chariton presents women as a superior alternative to the male sociopolitical order, which generally solves its disagreements through violence; Chaereas declares that war is the ultimate arbitrator among men (8.4.2). This alternative is particularly evident in Callirhoe’s interactions with the Persian women. When high Persian ladies are seeking a challenger to Callirhoe’s threatening beauty, “[a] vote was taken as in the theater” (5.3.4), just as Syracusan public assemblies are held there (1.1.12, 3.4.4 and 8.7.1)—a strikingly democratic procedure for despotic Persia, although the Egyptians also vote to pick their ruler (6.8.2). And Callirhoe, through the beauty contest, “conquers” Babylon, as Chaereas will conquer Tyre and Aradus. But instead of remaining rivals, the Persian royal women become Callirhoe’s close friends (Egger, Women 160). Callirhoe fears the Queen’s jealousy because if Chaereas, a Greek, could not control his jealousy, how could a barbarian Queen be expected to (6.6.5)? But in fact, Statira never fails to be protective of Callirhoe, even though she is aware of her husband’s transgressive infatuation. In turn, Callirhoe makes sure that Statira and the royal women are returned when Chaereas wants to make them trophies (8.3.1–2)76 and later commends her son to Statira’s attention (8.4.8). And just as Chaereas claims to have forged a link with the Great King, so Callirhoe asks the Queen to write often (8.4.8). Indeed, with a Persian godmother the child combines Ionian, Persian and Doric virtues.

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Now we can turn to the Syracuse of Hermocrates, Chaereas and Callirhoe. Besides that of Syracuse, idealizing descriptions of other historically real communities appeared in Chariton’s period, such as Plutarch (Lyc.) or Dio of Prusa (Jones, Roman World 56–64). There is considerable ideological signifcance in the comparison readers could make between Syracuse’s superior political processes, the dream of Greek freedom (and power it offers) and contemporary realities. Chariton provides an idealistic (if qualifed) description of Syracuse’s political processes (Alvares, Journey 154–65), while presenting many recognizable details of the Greek city-state. Connors (12– 26) suggests that Callirhoe presents a moment when one empire (the Athenian) is giving way to another (the Syracusan). Hermocrates is identifed early as victor over the Athenians (1.1.1), a triumph constantly referred to. Classical historians viewed the Athenian attack on Syracuse as prompted by excessive Athenian greed and other political problems, a disaster beginning the decline of Athenian power (Smith, Discourses 69). By Chariton’s time, the height of Greek excellence was often equated with Athenian achievement and sophistication; yet, there were also writers, like Plutarch, who stressed Spartan/Doric glories.77 Callirhoe takes a certain pro-Doric stance, and not just because its narrative is focalized through a Dorian hero;78 rather, I think, Chariton’s fantasy posits a Greek return to past greatness; since Greece’s decline occurred under the sway of Athenophilic values and since the Doric is also more remote and evocative of the epic past, the return to the Doric is cast as a return to former superior Greek values. At Syracuse, neither opulent private houses or vast estates nor personal boasting about wealth appears. There are no palaces or any manifestation of political subservience. Nor are slaves their master’s close confdants, nor do they meaningfully infuence them. Ariston’s fall from a ladder while at his farm (1.3.1) suggests involvement with real labor. Excessive injustice appeared in the wealthy Persian court, and considerable injustice was done even by the cultivated, but wealthy, Ionian Dionysius; the reader could link the greater justice, virtue and restraint of the Syracusans to their more modest lifestyle. Chariton’s Syracuse is a Greek polis, with an ekklēsia, boulē, stratēgoi and various other civil and military offcers—all familiar to Callirhoe’s reader from history and experience.79 There is no overt hint of the political tensions which would lead to Hermocrates being killed or Dionysius I becoming a harsh tyrant. Instead, Syracuse’s victory over a paradigmatic Athens is stressed. It has also reached a modus vivendi with Persia. Unlike many Greek cities of Chariton’s time (and unlike Artaxerxes’ Babylon), Syracuse’s social orders exhibit considerable harmony, and its ekklēsia performs important deliberative and legislative functions, instead of merely approving the decisions of the archons and boulē.80 Representatives of the whole social hierarchy participate in Callirhoe’s funeral (1.6.2–5),81 and when Hermocrates proposes an embassy to recover Callirhoe from Asia, the dēmos cries: “Let us sail!”—and most of the Boule immediately volunteer (3.4.17). The equal

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number of ambassadors chosen from the dēmos and boulē implies social unity. The rivalry of Hermocrates and Ariston (1.1.3) corresponds to the aristocratic rivalries of the Classical and Roman eras; indeed, Syracuse’s political rivalries, demagogues, would-be tyrants and excitable crowds are consistent with the declaimers’ image of civic life.82 Yet these forces do not seriously destabilize Syracuse. Instead, this rivalry between the two leading men is dissolved when Hermocrates, being φιλόπατρις, bows to the public will and allows his daughter to marry Ariston’s son (1.1.12). The jurors for Chaereas’ trial are selected by the archons (3.4.3), the trial is attended by the whole dēmos (1.5.2–3), and the jurors ignore the demagogues and follow Hermocrates’ recommendation to acquit Chaereas (1.6.1).83 When a fellow tomb robber suggests returning Callirhoe, Theron argued that, even if her parents were willing to pardon them, the dēmos and the archons would convict them (1.10.5). Hermocrates ensures Theron is investigated according to the law, in a public assembly, where jurors could be selected (3.4.3–4). The archons’ acceptance of an unnamed fsherman’s testimony (3.4.12) suggests more equal social conditions.84 Hermocrates subsequently crucifes Theron immediately according to the law (3.4.16),85 despite Chaereas’ pleas that he is needed to locate Callirhoe. Syracuse’s frst citizen, the stratēgos Hermocrates, is no dictator but a frst among equals whose advice is immediately accepted.86 He is a man of decision and political experience, and his status as conqueror of the Athenians is stressed.87 Callirhoe’s picture of Hermocrates as democratic leader, however, is ambiguous; Dionysius (2.6.2–3 and 3.2.8–9) views him “not as frst among citizen-statesmen, but as stratēgos with authority throughout Sicily and as a nobleman favored by the Persian court” (Smith, Greek Identity 79). But he and the victorious Chaereas do carefully seek the ekklēsia’s formal approval for their initiatives and share their wealth as public benefactors (8.8.14). Hermocrates’ political and military success, his subordination of personal desires to the popular will, his opposition to demagogues and strict adherence to justice augment his image as an ideal ruler of a “guided democracy” (Hunter, “History” 1077), which I suspect is the text’s implied political ideal. The arrangement of Callirhoe’s funeral functions as political statement regarding Hermocrates; in the procession, although that of a private citizen, all the social orders participate and the military plays a major role; the regalia of Hermocrates’ triumph fgure prominently. Smith suggests that this procession is Hermocrates’ rebuke to the Syracusans, who compelled him to make a marriage which apparently turned out badly, reminding them that his military triumphs brought true beneft to Syracuse (Greek Identity 146–47). Since the citizens react to Callirhoe’s death as if their city had fallen, in the funeral’s emphasis on the military, Hermocrates asserts how, despite Callirhoe’s loss, Syracuse remains secure. Smith sees a similar act in having Theron crucifed in front of the great tomb which belongs to Hermocrates and Callirhoe, being an object lesson to all who might oppose Hermocrates (181–82).

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This procession suggests possible competition between Chaereas and Hermocrates. Note how Callirhoe had told Artaxates that Chaereas was “frst man in the city” (πόλεως πρώτης [6.7.10]), which he was not—at that time. Does Callirhoe show an understanding of Chaereas’ ambitions (Smith, Greek Identity 212)? When Chaereas returns to Syracuse with his own private army, who soon become citizens, he is clearly the new leader of Syracuse. Initially, Chaereas is the favorite of the gymnasium, that aristocratic institution of athletic and military training (1.1.10), and he is an ephebe. The ephebes carry Callirhoe’s bier (1.6.5), and συνέφηβοι καὶ συγγυμνασταί, his political base, welcome Chaereas when he returns (8.6.11).88 The fact that the dēmos had forced Hermocrates to wed Chaereas to Callirhoe against Hermocrates’ wishes and had become the husband of godlike Callirhoe further proves Chaereas’ popular support. While Syracuse’s fagship, still adorned with the tokens of Syracuse’s (and Hermocrates’) victory, is sent in the search for Callirhoe, note how Hermocrates suggests they are simply sent out to take back a freeborn woman (3.4.16). Chaereas is in charge, but the search is tremendously dangerous. The public exuberance at the ship’s departure (3.5) echoes the ill-placed Athenian joy at the departure of the Sicilian expedition (Thuc. 6.30.2; Smith, Greek Identity 186–88). Yet Chaereas’ parents plead with him not to go, recalling Hector’s parents imploring him to come within the walls of Troy, as well as the weakness of Jason’s father (Ap. Rhod. Argon. 253). The outcome is disastrous; as the Athenian survivors ended up in Syracusan quarries, so the fagship is destroyed, most of the crew killed, and Chaereas ends up as a chained slave working on a plantation. Unlike the Alcibiades of the Symposium, who is overjoyed at receiving his command, Chaereas, unable to take the pressure, tried to commit suicide. And while Chaereas has not mutilated any hermai, he has assaulted an agalma of Syracuse—Callirhoe. The story of Athens (always in the novel’s background) is one of success, then excess followed by ruin; frst occurred the defeat of Persia, which in Callirhoe is made an Athenian victory, not a pan-Greek one, which leads to Athenian expansion, and then division and overreach with the Sicilian expedition. Callirhoe’s narrative mimics this pattern: Syracuse has had its great defeat (over Athens) and now seems to wield considerable power beyond Sicily.89 Further, the society is divided (Hermocrates vs. Ariston). And, sure enough, disasters soon follow, including a type of botched Sicilian expedition led by a quasi-Alcibiades. But instead of this disaster initiating irreversible decline, it provides a test that furthers Syracuse’s excellence. Athens fails due to its greed; the disasters Chaereas faces, of course, are in punishment for his sins against Eros, Aphrodite and Callirhoe, faults he repents of—one could never say that about the Athenians. When later Chaereas joins the Egyptians, he displays “. . . intelligence and courage, and trustworthiness besides, for he was not without a noble character and education” (7.2.5). Mastery at war is a defning characteristic of epic. The Greek novels told of the martial exploits of Ninus, Sesonchosis and the protagonists of the

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Babyloniaka. During the war with Persia, Chaereas’ deeds recall those of Achilles and his Myrmidons, Odysseus, Diomedes, Agamemnon, Leonidas, Alexander the Great, Xenophon during the retreat of the Ten Thousand, Themistocles and the Athenians at Salamis, possibly those of the Athenian admiral Chabrias (Bartsch, Charitonroman 5), plus the generic Homeric aristeia.91 During the chaotic battle before Tyre, Chaereas makes the frst kill (7.4.6), and he alone remains prudent (7.4.9). Chaereas is also a nation (re)builder. A common utopian theme is the inclusive state, a concern of some writers of the Second Sophistic (e.g., Dio and Aelius Aristides), as well as Judeo-Christian apocalyptic. After the Egyptian king’s death and Callirhoe’s recovery, Chaereas returns to Syracuse, bringing vast Persian spoils from Aradus and also an adoring retinue of Egyptians, Cypriots, Aradians and Doric Greeks. They constitute a miniature international empire, one that willingly organizes itself around the excellent Chaereas, which stands in opposition to the Persian empire, whose subjects must be forcibly retained. Note the philosopher whom Chaereas employs as ambassador to reconcile the Egyptians with the Great King (8.3.10).92 This ideal state infuses its aristocracy and commons with men of various nations who have proven their excellence. Thus, Chaereas’ 300 Dorians are given each a talent which will allow them to buy a modest estate and to live as aristocrats. And even the Egyptians are given land to farm (8.8.14). Chaereas’ Greeks, made citizens by public vote, immediately take their place in the assembly (8.8.13). Chaereas emphasizes how his comrades-in-arms learned that “united in spirit we could gain mastery of the sea” (8.2.10; Smith, Greek Identity 230). While this is no community of equals, and Greek supremacy is assumed, yet this society is cosmopolitan. For the cities of Asia Minor and Egypt with large non-Greek components, the status and treatment of non-Greeks was always an issue, and that they carefully provided for the Egyptians, whom Greeks often despised, suggests a more enlightened attitude. Chaereas returns clearly as the successor to Hermocrates and his father Ariston,93 and indeed, his achievements are greater than Hermocrates’; after listing some of the Chaereas’ spoils, Chariton declares that “the whole city was flled, not as previously after the Sicilian war with the poverty of Attica, but, paradoxically, with the spoils of Media in time of peace” (8.6.12). In his concluding speech (8.7.3–11), Chaereas does more than fulfll the Syracusan crowd’s desire for details; instead, he unfolds a new history that makes the past’s evils no longer painful and meaningless; he has rewritten history according to a meaning that he has discovered only in the course of time. Now Chaereas, having desired and now being much desired, in secure possession of men, wealth and a virtual goddess, can proclaim his own Word of the Father to defne himself and his deeds and reframe Callirhoe’s patently transgressive actions, such as being married to Dionysius and allowing him to raise their child.94 His former comrades-in-arms (and new citizens) are the backbone of a new regime. Chaereas’ proposals are immediately passed by the Syracusans—as Hermocrates’ once were.

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Hermocrates may have used Callirhoe as a buttress to his authority in the funeral procession and seemed to come into confict with Chaereas over Theron’s speedy execution. But now Chaereas and Hermocrates work together. Perhaps grief had broken him, for the still mourning Hermocrates is described, when Chaereas arrives, as “present now, but in the background” (8.6.7). Chaereas’ homecoming seems more like the triumphal entrance of a Hellenistic king or Caesar with his consort than a democratic leader. And this image of the regal Callirhoe must condition our evaluation of the extent to which Callirhoe is “erased” (Temmerman 104–05). While clearly Chaereas is the couple’s public voice, with all authority in his hands, Hellenistic queens and the wives of emperors could wield considerable informal power. We have observed how Callirhoe gained increasing power over Dionysius, and how Chaereas defers to her. Thus, there is good reason to expect that Callirhoe’s infuence will endure. Other details suggest that the ideal Syracuse will blend the best of East and West. Callirhoe and Chaereas insist their child will return from Miletus, with the wealth and upbringing of Dionysius (2.11.2 and 8.7.12) and Statira as godmother (8.4.8). Callirhoe’s child may also be a type of Aeneas, with Callirhoe a stand-in for Aphrodite (Laplace, “Légendes” 121). One popular suggestion is that their child is the future Dionysius I of Syracuse (Naber 98), whose realm extended across much of Sicily and into southern Italy along the Adriatic as far north as Ancona (Connors 16). Some stories suggest his origins were obscure. Perhaps Callirhoe’s child should be thought of simply as a future ruler of Syracuse, perhaps also called Dionysius, a generic name for an empire-building Syracusan ruler. Connors (177–88), however, suggests that Chariton rewrites Dionysius’ tyranny as an allegory on Augustus’ revision of his own tyrannical past and present which celebrates the coming of Rome, a rewriting inspired by Aphrodisias’ own positive depictions of the legends of Troy and the JulioClaudian rulers. Callirhoe also may present echoes of Augustus’ triumph over the pirates of Sextus Pompey, his rebuilding of the walls of Syracuse and even of Julius Caesar’s famous Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος (Plut. Pomp. 60.2),95 a phrase used by Theron as he decides to rob Callirhoe’s tomb (1.7.1). Gerschmann suggested that Chariton’s reader would associate Theron’s choice with Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon, both being reckless gambles on luck (15). Perhaps, too, Theron is meant to recall Julius Caesar as the paradigmatic emblem for Rome’s rapacious imperial rule. Accordingly, Caesar’s bid for power would be equated with a reckless pirate’s bid for greater plunder. Chariton notes how the crucifed Theron “gazed out upon that sea over which he had carried Hermocrates’ daughter captive, whom not even the Athenians had captured” (3.4.18).96 Since Callirhoe is the most valuable object in Syracuse, in taking away Callirhoe, Theron’s deed evokes something the Romans achieved that the Athenians could not—to despoil Syracuse and take away its treasures to adorn Rome, about which Marcellus boasted (Plut. Marc. 21.5). Note, too, that Octavian crucifed many followers of

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Sextus Pompey, just as Theron is crucifed. But instead of seeing a laudatory reference to Augustus’ restoration of order in Sicily, I wonder if here the Greek Hermocrates is seen exceeding the deeds of Octavian/Augustus, for Hermocrates has also put down piracy, but with justice applied even at personal cost to himself. And, further, if Theron equals Caesar, the plundering Roman, Hermocrates has symbolically crucifed a symbol of Roman piratical imperialism.97 Callirhoe displays the reasoning that enabled subject peoples to accommodate themselves to the social and political status quo and the contradictory attitudes of Greeks who profted from their relationship with Rome.98 Chaereas and Callirhoe had ample opportunity to learn the mechanisms of despotism. Callirhoe’s Egyptian revolt is in part a revolt against tyranny. The Egyptians, after they have killed the Persian satrap, elect a king (κεχειροτονηκέναι [6.8.2]), who rules with help of a boulē (7.3.1), comprised of commanders and renowned leaders. Chaereas, joining the Egyptian king’s army, declares that “Artaxerxes has treated us like a tyrant” (7.2.4), implying that, both having experienced Persian oppression, they are natural allies. In turn, the Egyptian king is no despot but instead pointedly calls his allies friends (7.3.2), just as Chaereas does, and shows other qualities of the good ruler (Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 140). In the Egyptian king’s council, Chaereas seemed prepared to challenge the Persian empire’s existence (7.4), and he symbolically conquers Great King by capturing his wife, as observed in the letter Chaereas sends to him (8.4.2–3 and 8.1.13–14). Yet when Callirhoe claims that the King, although he loved her, never touched her, not even a kiss, Chaereas is sorry for revolting (8.1.16). There is no further talk of assaulting Persia; indeed, Chaereas boasts to the Syracusans of reconciling them to the Great King (8.8.10). Yet, considering what our protagonists have experienced and what they have learned about the nature of tyranny, how is this reversal explained? Perhaps, Callirhoe lies to keep Chaereas from attempting something rash and dangerous. As noted, the idealization of the Great King goes back to Aeschylus. And to many Greeks, Romans were somewhere between Greeks and barbarians, capable of improvement, especially through Greek paideia (Preston), and this notion is refected here, for the Great King does return to his former virtues (Alvares, “Love”), as demonstrated by his abandonment of unneeded baggage (including Callirhoe) on Aradus (7.4.12–13), his granting of Callirhoe to Dionysius (7.5.15) and his eager embrace of Statira (7.4.11–13). It is an accommodationist strategy to downplay systemic evils and focus on the ruler, who is represented as betrayed or corrupted by his underlings or as one who has merely fallen from his innate nobility and self-control, but remains potentially an ideal leader. For Chaereas, past has been prologue. Hermocrates was a friend to the Great King—who even sends him presents (2.6.3). In defeating Artaxerxes’ forces but returning his Queen, Chaereas, like Hermocrates before, has reached a modus vivendi with a dominant power, as Callirhoe does also with

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Statira. Chariton probably lived early enough to see Nero’s fall and Vespasian’s accession with help from the East. Chaereas has gathered worthy Greeks out of the Greek diaspora and given them a social position to revitalize a traditional Greek polis, while even making provision for the Egyptians. Recall how Chaereas stresses that it was their unity which permitted their victories. Despite accommodationist attitudes toward an imperial power, Chaereas has learned the true power of the Greeks, and the need to concentrate and unify that power, as well as to take a proper concern for the non-Greeks they rule. Callirhoe may refect a dream of Greek power and independence, as well as a fantasy that Rome, under pressure from forces within and without, could be forced to respect and even depend on its Greek element—note how, on both sides of the Egyptian rebellion, it was Greeks who were responsible for victory—and thus allow a true freedom of the Greeks, as Aemilius Paullus and Nero once proclaimed. As discussed earlier, the narrative’s “double vision” often presents aristocrats who have endured the humiliations and abuse familiar to members of the lower orders, while still retaining normative aristocratic attitudes. Callirhoe gives a negative view of slaves, observed in how Callirhoe is set up, because the tyrant of Acragas’ henchman seduces her maid (1.4), and how slaves encourage Dionysius and Artaxerxes to evil and how the plans of Mithridates go awry due to his servants’ unrestrained behavior (4.5.4–6). Chaereas is subjected to brutal servitude which recalls the labors of a Roman-era latifundia, and he and Polycharmus, although innocent, are nearly crucifed in the aftermath of an escape attempt (4.2.7–11). Yet when brought before Mithridates, there is no hint that they disagree with Mithridates executing innocent slaves along with the guilty. But consider how Chaereas in his letter tells Callirhoe: “For you I went up on the cross, complaining about nothing” (4.4.10), and earlier in the same letter, Chaereas speaks of Mithridates in rather fattering terms. From Chaereas’ perspective, the cross is somewhat deserved, due to his crime against Callirhoe. Yet there is one moment when a protagonist shows a glimmer of awareness of what is lost through slavery. When Dionysius frst sees Callirhoe, he bows, thinking her Aphrodite. But Leonas assures him this is the slave he has bought, and then tells Callirhoe: “‘And you, woman, come and meet your master.’ And so Callirhoe bowed her head at the name of ‘master’ and shed a food of tears, learning at last what it means to lose one’s freedom” (2.3.6). Statira is given a similar moment (8.3.5). While I do not read Chaereas as an Alcibiades quite extensively as Smith does, I agree important details are recalled. Chariton compares the handsomeness of Chaereas to that of Alcibiades, and, like Alcibiades, he is a type of “Great Individual” whose excellence has the potential for excess, scandal and tyrannical activity (Smith, Discourses 333–48). Much of Syracuse adored Chaereas, as Alcibiades was the cynosure of Athens. During their quarrel over the remains of a kōmos found outside their house, Callirhoe hints that Chaereas’ other lovers may have been jealous (1.3.6); perhaps

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Chaereas has a homoerotic following consistent with life within the Classical gymnasium.99 Chaereas’ violent assault upon Callirhoe, while recalling the assault on Glycera in Menander’s Periceiromene (Hunter, “History” 1064; Borgogno 257–58), also evokes the actions of Periander and Nero against their spouses; indeed, a tyrant’s assault on wives is a common pattern in literature.100 Even on the night of their reunion, as Callirhoe tells her story, she discerns Chaereas’ anger rising again, which makes her give an edited version of Artaxerxes’ actions. Chaereas’ boasts of his conquests verge on the excessive (8.1.17), and his homecoming to the Syracusans recalls the display of a Hellenistic warlord or Roman imperator rather than a democratic leader. Like Alcibiades, Chaereas is impulsive and self-indulgent to the end; when he frst learns of the Egyptian king’s death, it is Callirhoe who makes him produce a lying tale to aid their escape from Aradus (8.2.4–5). Chaereas manipulates his followers to make a decision he wants (to sail to Syracuse), but, like Agamemnon testing the army (but in his case successfully), he pretends to disagree (8.2.10–14; Smith, Discourses 231; Temmerman 99). But note that he makes sure nobody unwillingly follows him to Syracuse. Still, like Alcibiades, Chaereas’ excellence is uneasily accommodated with a democratic framework, and the reader might wonder if his personal characteristics of jealousy, anger and self-indulgence really will make him a proper leader for the future. In fact, Chaereas’ speech echoes Alcibiades’ speech on his return to Athens, being a sophisticated bit of manipulation which puts his and Callirhoe’s actions in a better light and gives himself more credit than deserved. Chaereas’ letter to Artaxerxes declares Chaereas is a victor, because the war was fought over Callirhoe (8.4.2). This is not so false; while Chaereas did not go to war to recover Callirhoe, he certainly went to war to avenge himself against the Great King, as the Greeks sought revenge for Helen from Paris and Priam at Troy (Temmerman 106–07).

The amatory bond Callirhoe demonstrates realism in the expectation of arraigned marriages, worry over public scandals concerning family life, the practice of abortion and child exposure, the abuse of wives, the sexual exploitation of slaves, the irregular loves associated with the kōmos and gymnasium culture, the rights of male guardians over children, especially daughters, and the general privileging of public over private life. Callirhoe and Statira and other women remain largely tokens within a system of male power relations (Elsom). Callirhoe is constantly enclosed, from Syracuse to Babylon, by various men, and her life appears a movement from one set of interiors to another (Egger, Women 271 ff. and 296). Chariton details (somewhat superfcially) the struggles involved in transforming a relationship based on love at frst sight into deeper, more permanent union. The novel supports conventional proprieties and projects an idealized past, when women had less freedom, romantic love leading to marriage was less common and private life was given less value.

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Chaereas does not dream of defying his father, when told marriage with Callirhoe is impossible, and Callirhoe cannot even bring herself to admit her love. Their marriage at the start has full public sanction, given again as Chaereas details their adventures at the end of Book 8. Chaereas and Callirhoe do not enjoy the sort of marriage envisioned by Plutarch, where each spouse overtly helps the other in philosophic advancement. Callirhoe, however, does show herself quite able to adjust herself (as Plutarch would advise) to her mate’s emotions (especially regarding Chaereas’ propensity to jealousy), and both Chaereas and Dionysius make an effort to accommodate Callirhoe’s feelings. But Plutarch would have been appalled by Chaereas’ lack of self-control and erotic emotionalism. Plutarch’s notion of a maleoriented blending of husband and wife, with the husband the public face of the marriage, is superfcially the case at Syracuse, although, in Callirhoe’s communications with Statira and her negotiations with Dionysius, she shows independence. Her judgment and ingenuity surpasses that of Chaereas. Through his adventures and struggles, Chaereas comes to learn the proper faith in the beloved needed by a lover, actions which partially subvert notions of male dominance. Plutarch claimed women could be a spur to their husband’s endeavors; accordingly, Chaereas says to Callirhoe: “But I have not shamed you. I have flled earth and sea with trophies!” (8.1.17). The most noted ideal element in our novels is the perfection of the protagonists’ amatory bond. The intensity of Chaereas and Callirhoe’s love is shown by their mutual debilitation (one quite unmanly with respect to Chaereas) after falling in love, as well as their laments, despair and suicidal gestures, but also by the mutual desire indicated by Callirhoe’s early pregnancy (2.8.4). Chaereas is no erotic predator, nor is Callirhoe his “conquest”; he can plead that she is his frst love (4.4.9–11). Callirhoe presents an equal amatory intensity, with considerable, although not complete, symmetry between the couple.101 Eros makes a yoke to unite them (1.1.3). Their companionate union recalls Homer’s depiction of the marriage of Penelope and Odysseus, who seem to emotionally share stories of their adventures and make love to affrm their bond, as a Homeric tag indicates (8.1.17). They are capable of a more equitable exchange of feelings, as demonstrated by their initial quarrel (1.3.4–7). Callirhoe remains fundamentally loyal to Chaereas even though she has good reasons, personal and practical, not to. But that is a central fantasy of lovers: to have a lover who sees, strongly appreciates and trusts one’s basic goodness and remains devoted despite (sometimes horrifc) lapses and changes of circumstance and time. Some modern readers might wonder what Callirhoe sees in Chaereas, but this view is misplaced. The attitude of the Syracusans and later the varied individuals who join Chaereas during the Egyptian rebellion testify to his excellence, as do his martial deeds. Chaereas’ remorse and sufferings for Callirhoe likewise show his virtue. Of course, he is outstandingly handsome and, at heart, is totally devoted to love. And considering their behaviors, Dionysius102 and the Great King are hardly perfect potential mates. They offer security, wealth

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and power to Callirhoe, but not a union based on those valued emotional bonds. Thus, while Callirhoe makes no claim to present an amatory education as does D & C, it does present the couple’s evolving “career of desire,” as well as those of Dionysius and Artaxerxes, whose histories describe three stages of an amatory relationship, demonstrating how they fail to perform as proper lovers and are returned (or not) to proper amatory behavior, and the price they pay.103 Callirhoe provides a narrative of development coextensive with the couple’s adventures, and the utopian outcome lies in how the protagonists, amid temptations and obstacles, develop their positive characteristics and fnd workable solutions to various threats, their success proven by the happy ending. But it is not easy. Callirhoe’s Aphrodite is aggressive and transgressive, and Aphrodite is pointedly called mother of Eros (1.2.8). I see no clear moral or ethical causation in Aphrodite’s actions; Callirhoe’s Aphrodite is a god as Apollo is in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, and such gods manipulate human beings and their lives to make a point—manipulations also congruent with a mortal’s own faws. Aphrodite can overrule Tyche (8.1.3) and performs a role rather like Apuleius’ Isis, a.k.a. fortuna videns. While the protagonist’s love seems ideal, even god-crafted, there are transgressions, violence, deceptions, jealousy, various rivals and antagonists; yet, they will have their happy (happyish?) ending. Chaereas is a novice lover whose chief fault is impulsive jealousy. Chaereas has been given a gift greater than Aphrodite gave Paris, yet betrays a lack of trust in Callirhoe’s amatory fdelity, which allows Chaereas to be tricked into violently assaulting her, a crime he spends much of the novel atoning for, until he demonstrates that he has learned his lesson (8.1.3–4). Yet Chaereas, given to misogynistic suspicions, until Callirhoe’s recovery on Aradus, doubts that Callirhoe has remained faithful to him, and not without reason.104 Obviously, her marriage to Dionysius nearly shatters Chaereas. When Chaereas is about to kill himself, seeing her empty tomb, he imagines her again unfaithful to him, like Semele and Aridane who took up with gods (3.3.4). Before his cross, he moans: “Callirhoe, it is because of you that we are suffering like this! You are the cause of all our troubles!” (4.2.7). At the trial, he observes how Callirhoe does not even try to speak to him. And when Dionysius tells Chaereas that the Great King has awarded Callirhoe to him, Chaereas believes him. In myth and literature, it is men more than women who are able to abandon their old lovers and take new ones, but Chaereas’ letter to Callirhoe resembles the letter of a woman to her faithless husband, especially the evocation of the wedding night when Chaereas lost his virginity (4.4.9–11). Although Chaereas never quite abandons his refexive jealousy, I would argue his improved faith in Callirhoe’s actions becomes clear where he openly admits to the Syracusans that Callirhoe has been married to another man and that she has given their child to him to rear; he even vaunts Dionysius’ nobility (8.7.12). Considering classical Greek culture’s strict standards of male reputation and female comportment, this

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admission and its tone seem a remarkable concession regarding the works of a transgressive Aphrodite and Callirhoe’s virtue. The Great King represents love’s “midlife crisis,” so to speak, when his loyalty to Statira is compromised by his infatuation for Callirhoe, a failure with both personal and political repercussions, and, as noted, his tragic potential is defused. Chariton’s monarch combines some of the characteristics of the lustful ruler found in the sources for Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes, but also resembles the middle-class husband of New Comedy, distracted and embarrassed at his infatuation with a younger woman, with Artaxates the servile enabler. It is no accident that when Artaxerxes decides to accept fully Artaxates’ sophistries and plots which threatened his marriage with Statira (6.4.7–10), a revolt breaks out in Egypt which threatens his empire. He takes Callirhoe as part of his baggage train, indicating his erotic preoccupations.105 And just as Callirhoe’s loss caused Chaereas to reform, the loss of Tyre and then of his Queen impels the deeply distressed King to change his behavior (8.5.2). He abandons his excess baggage on Aradus (including Callirhoe), and then, victorious on land, he sacrifces to the martial Heracles (8.5.2) and even rewards Callirhoe to Dionysius (7.5.15). And even though Artaxerxes envies Chaereas, he seems glad Callirhoe is gone (8.5.8). When Chaereas returns Statira, the King cannot even wait for the ship to be properly docked before leaping abroad and embracing his wife and weeping for joy (8.5.5). Just as Chaereas is separated from Callirhoe when his distrust leads to rage and a near-fatal kick, so Artaxerxes loses Statira after betraying her by pursing Callirhoe. When Statira returns, the Great King’s emotional actions reproduce those of a reformed lover. Thus, due to his interactions with Chaereas and Callirhoe, Artaxerxes becomes the sort of lover of Statira he never was before, for he now learns of Eros, not only for Callirhoe but for Statira, having passed a kind of test, whereas Dionysius was tested—and failed. Artaxerxes has at least to be convinced (however superfcially) that his actions do not constitute a violation of another man’s wife; Dionysius never fnds a correct justifcation for his lack of loyalty to his dead wife, nor his violation of Hermocrates’ paternal rights. The fnal-stage role of a lover is to remain devoted to the memory of the dead beloved (Konstan 45–59). Yet Dionysius is a widower who, instead of cherishing the memory of his dead wife and raising their child, becomes infatuated with Callirhoe and lets his bailiff raise his own daughter. The epitome of such postmortem devotion is Aegialeus in Xenophon’s Ephesiaka, a fsherman who has mummifed his wife and still sees her as on the day they eloped (5.1.10–11). In the Alcestis, Admetus suggests he may be comforted by Alcestis coming to him in his dreams (Eur. Alc. 354–56). Dionysius is described as still “overcome with grief” at his wife’s death (2.1.1), but note that the morning Dionysius frst learns about Callirhoe, he declares he is feeling better, because he has had a sweet dream of his former wife on the day he brought her home after the wedding. Dionysius is beginning to experience the delights of this fnal stage of the amatory career, but instead

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of remaining devoted to the dreams of his prior wife, he pursues Callirhoe. Consider how Dionysius later berates himself for his infatuation with Callirhoe when still in mourning (2.4.5) and how, after his bailiff, seeing his disturbed appearance one morning, asks: “Why are you so sleepless, master? Can it be that sorrow for your dead life is again troubling you?” Dionysius responds: “Sorrow, yes, and for a woman . . . but not for her who is dead” (2.4.6). Unlike Chaereas and the Great King, Dionysius never returns to his proper devotion for his frst love, and for this, he pays a hefty price. Callirhoe’s letter begs Dionysius never to take a stepmother (8.4.5), and thus, Dionysius will spend the remainder of his life cultivating the image of a woman he thinks (mistakenly) still really loves him (8.5.14–15), raising a child he knows he must one day lose, while not realizing it is another man’s child. Indeed, Chariton gives us more detail about the marriage of Dionysius and Callirhoe than of any other union, one founded and later maintained by acts of coercion and deception. Admittedly, Dionysius often shows a remarkable concern for her feelings and chooses to starve himself to death than compel Callirhoe to marry him (3.1.1). He shows considerable restraint when learning about Chaereas (3.7) and strives to console her, even allowing her (if mostly for tactical reasons) to build his costly tomb.106 But his fundamental dishonesty is coupled to an imbalance of power relations, too; Dionysius makes himself believe their marriage is valid because she gave herself to him—but she was never free to choose. Dionysius remains a more obsessed lover than a mature spouse; note Dionysius shows little interest in his nameless daughter, whose rearing he entrusts to his bailiff (1.12.8). Similarly, Dionysius values Callirhoe’s child as an enduring connection with her, as Dionysius admits (3.8.3 and 5.9.2; Egger, Women 335–36).

The testing and development of Callirhoe That novel’s title was probably Callirhoe,107 and the fact that more words are devoted to Callirhoe’s story than Chaereas’ and that Chariton concludes his novel with Τοσάδε περὶ Καλλιρρόης συνέγραψα, points to Callirhoe as the novel’s fundamental focus, her life manifesting the ideal in two ways: frst, Callirhoe, somewhat like Helen, somewhat like Kore, being a tool and victim of Aphrodite and Eros, is a catalyst for world-historical changes stretching from Syracuse to Babylon. Secondly, on the human level, there is ideal potential in positive descriptions of her character and personality changes. I have detailed how Chaereas develops into a political and romantic hero, despite personality faws and external circumstances. Callirhoe has an even more challenging path to her (problematical) happy end. Callirhoe is designated as pepaideumenē (6.5.8, 7.6.5 and 1.12.9)108 and sōphrōn (2.8.4, 2.10.7, 2.11.5 and 6.4.10), also as having eugeneia.109 She likewise shows stability (eustastheia [1.2.6]) and an ability to hide and control her emotions (Temmerman 84–85). Her fundamental faithfulness to Chaereas deepens through testing. The conficted Callirhoe must manage at least three shadow selves:

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Helen, Medea and Penelope. Callirhoe is a Helen whose powerful sexual attractiveness is aligned with the loyalty of a Penelope, whose character tradition also makes ambiguous.110 Had her motivations and outcomes been less pleasant, Callirhoe would have resembled a character in a Milesian tale “Of the woman with two husbands.” Note, for a while, she pretends to be from Sybaris (1.12.8 and 2.1.9).111 As described above, her temptation to abort her child recalls Medea, while her marriage to the Eastern Dionysius connects with her Helen potential. Callirhoe, in her fnal speech to Aphrodite, recalls how she frst saw Chaereas as a parthenos. She will suffer due to her lack of worldly experience and considerable vulnerability as a slave in Dionysius’ house and in the Great King’s harem, although Callirhoe can act with the spirit of Hermocrates’ daughter, as when she refutes Chaereas’ accusations (1.3.6). A signifcant confict for Heliodorus’ Charikleia concerns how to remain sōphrōn while in an erotic relationship with Theagenes. For Callirhoe, it is how to remain sōphrōn when sold to Dionysius, who wants to marry her, after she discovers she is pregnant with Chaereas’ child. Faced with dangerous, morally problematic situations, Callirhoe grows in experience and ability to act with virtue and deceit. Callirhoe’s frst husband has kicked her, apparently to death, and, as far as she knows, nobody is seeking her. Dionysius, although he supposedly respects the rights of her father Hermocrates, has no real intention of repatriating her. Callirhoe lacks a male guardian to protect her unborn son, who at best will be born a slave. Above, we saw how, after making the diffcult choice not to abort her child, Callirhoe’s decision to give herself in marriage by autoekdosis to Dionysius logically followed (3.2.9 and 5.8.5; Egger, Women 393–94). But note how she then dresses up and made herself more attractive: “. . . for once she had resolved upon marriage, she considered that her beauty constituted her country and lineage” (3.2.16), a shocking statement, considering Callirhoe’s evocations of Hermocrates and Syracuse. This mindset indicates Callirhoe’s problematical attitudes, and, I argue, the subsequent events serve as Callirhoe’s own educational penance, somewhat in parallel with those penances of Chaereas, which make her discover and demonstrate her potential for greater fdelity. Initially, married to Dionysius, Callirhoe seemingly has found security; when Chaereas sees Callirhoe’s golden statue, the attendant declares how this statue is of one who “was once a slave, and Aphrodite has made her mistress of us all” (3.6.5). But soon Callirhoe has nightmares of Chaereas in chains (3.7.4), making her realize how much Chaereas has suffered for her, but also revealing to Dionysius Callirhoe’s undying love for Chaereas. She can only hope Chaereas may still live. Once married, she is soon made mistress of his estate (3.7.7), and, after she gives birth (3.8.3), she becomes bigger and stronger, being “no longer a girl, but a mature woman” (3.8.3) and clearly a force to be reckoned with (Temmerman 75). Callirhoe was initially unfamiliar with the trickery of slaves and trusted Plangon too readily; Callirhoe becomes increasingly able to manipulate others. For example, after Chaereas declares anybody who wishes can follow him to Syracuse,

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Callirhoe takes him apart by the hand to ask if he intends to take the Persian women to Syracuse (8.3.1). This gesture has earlier been used by fgures trying to manipulate Callirhoe, but now it reveals Callirhoe’s own mastery (Temmerman 81). Her master trick is to make Dionysius agree to rear Chaereas’ child, while believing it was his and that Callirhoe still loves him. But despite this increasing power, Callirhoe lives a haunted, guilty life with Dionysius, seen as she prays for mercy for her and her child from Aphrodite (3.8.7–9), only to learn of Chaereas’ prior arrival and (apparent) death, knowledge which plunges her into desperate, potentially tragic, despair.112 The worried Dionysius allows her to build Chaereas’ cenotaph (duplicating her Syracusan tomb [4.1.6]), but Chaereas’ funeral causes further disasters, as Mithridates falls desperately in love with her (4.1.9). This, in turn, brings about Mithridates’ sparing of Chaereas from crucifxion and using him in a failed attempt to compromise Callirhoe, which leads to Mithridates, Dionysius and Callirhoe being summoned to Babylon by the Great King who himself is already being tempted by rumors of Callirhoe’s beauty (4.6.7). Her wondrous appearance has driven an increasingly important series of men near mad with desire, but Callirhoe learns the emptiness of this success and recognizes her true devotion to Chaereas when he is revealed alive at the trial. As noted, her climatic choice comes as Artaxates mocks her for her faithfulness to Chaereas when offered a relationship with one considered a god on earth; nevertheless, Callirhoe would not have “welcomed a marriage even with Zeus himself or even counted immortality better than a single day with Chaereas” (6.7.12), and she ignores Artaxates’ threats of torture. Later, on Aradus, when apparently one of Chaereas’ underlings suggests that his commander will make her his wife (7.6.7),113 Callirhoe seems quite ready to die than compromise herself again (7.6.8). Having shown these manifestations of true fdelity in the face of temptation, Callirhoe attains her reunion. But there are further machinations. She later manipulates Chaereas (perhaps for his own good) by telling an edited account of the Great King’s interest in her. She builds upon her earlier deception in her last letter to Dionysius, encouraging him to believe that she has left him unwillingly (8.5.13–15). Callirhoe commends her child to Dionysius and even orders him to marry his daughter off to their supposed son, all without consulting Chaereas; note how she blushes on sending the letter (8.4.9; Temmerman 79). Finally, it can be argued that she helps stage-manage Chaereas’ return to Syracuse, where she may wield the power of an imperial consort, although never without fear of what reversals Aphrodite may bring. Elements of Frye’s sixth phase of romance, one of isolation, introspection and sometimes decay, occur when Callirhoe, alone before Aphrodite’s statue (8.8.15–6), refecting on her adventures, tells the goddess she bears her no ill will about her sufferings, but simply begs that she never be separated from Chaereas again (Alvares, “Love” 115). Love may make the world go around, but human nature is still weak and unstable, and Tychē’s fearful processes cannot be ignored. Now I see Callirhoe ending with Syracuse posed to become the new, improved leader of the Greek world, but with the

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implication that matters still could go wrong, just as they obviously went wrong after the perfections of Xenophon’s Cyrus. In fact, I wonder if, when Callirhoe asks not to be separated from Chaereas, the future death of the unnamed daughter of Hermocrates is implied and that the separation will be one of a real, not false, death. Perhaps, we are also to imagine that the child did become the tyrannical Dionysius I.114 Callirhoe has endured, she has saved their marriage and child, made Chaereas reach his full potential, preserved a kind of sōphrosynē and even achieved not only experience, but perhaps some wisdom.

Summary What distinguishes Callirhoe’s presentation of the ideal is its use of archetypal patterns, positive revisions of canonical myths and many realistic historiographical elements (with no truly miraculous interventions as in the other novels) to create a kind of semi-plausible alternate history. Love drives historical processes to produce, in the adventures, sufferings and personal development of the protagonists, a reformed Syracuse, a model suggesting how Chariton’s Greek world might gain more freedom for itself in relationship to the Roman web of power. Further, the reader can recognize, in the manner in which the non-ideal elements of their characters and transgressive actions barely avoid tragedy in route to the happy ending, the disturbing and surprising ways life and love often work. Thus, I would argue that Callirhoe presents the most imaginatively plausible dream of a (albeit limited) better world for Chariton’s Greek readers of the novels I consider.

Notes 1 I use the Greek text and translation by Goold. 2 Chariton probably writes in the latter half of the frst century CE; see Plepelits, Kallirhoe 4–9; Ruiz Montero, “Rise” 63–69; Hernández Lara, “Rhetorical Aspects” and Estudios; Reardon, Chaereas 312–17; Bowie, “Chronology.” 3 On Callirhoe as a historical novel, see Hägg, “Callirhoe”; Ruiz Montero, “Rise” 47; Blake; Hunter, “History” 1056–62. 4 On Callirhoe’s historical dimensions, see Bartsch, Charitonroman 1–34; Schmeling, Chariton 51–56 and 76–80; Plepelits, Kallirhoe 16–17; Perry, Ancient Romances 77–78; Hunter, “History” 1055–61; Salmon 365–76. 5 Gerschmann; Plepelits, Kallirhoe; Papanikolaou; Heiserman, Novel 75–116; Smith, Discourses. Hunter sees in Chariton a fairly sophisticated “exploitation of the gap between historiography and epic . . . to create a new literature which openly proclaimed its own appropriations” (“History” 1083). 6 For discussion, see Hunter, “History” 1079; Cueva, Myths 16–25. 7 See Alvares, Journey 278–83 and “Chariton’s Erotic History” 613–29. 8 See Müller, “Chariton” 134–35; Reardon, Form 77–83 and 101–06; Cicu. 9 Note how Chaereas prays for Aphrodite to give him the women she had granted him and then immediately looks up and sees Callirhoe’s statue (3.5.3). 10 The trial evokes Helen with the Trojan elders about to watch the duel between Menelaus and Paris, which will remain undecided; see Temmerman 54. Dionysius sees Chaereas as a kind of risen Protesilaus (5.10.1), known for his rash

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11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26

27 28 29 30

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bravery. But his brief conquest of death ended with his return to Hades and his wife’s suicide. But Chariton’s Protesilaus will have a happy ending. On Chariton’s use of this myth, see Scourfeld, “Chaereas”; Cueva, “Plutarch’s Ariadne”; Smith, Identity 99–104. See 1.1.1–2, 1.1.16, 2.3.6–7, 3.2.17, 4.1.19, 4.7.5–7 and 8.6.11; also Muchow 75– 87; Helms 42–45; Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 126; Laplace, “Légendes” 121–22; Edwards, Acts 29–51; Alvares, Journey 218–22. Callirhoe’s treatment as a virtual goddess corresponds to the practice of treating high ladies of the Hellenistic and imperial periods as divinities; Edwards, Religion 95–96; Helms 42–45; Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 126; Alvares, Journey 216–26. An image probably having cultic associations; consider popular Goddess and Child images, such as Isis and Horus or Demeter and Persephone. 1.1.5, 2.2.7, 2.3.9, 3.6.3, 3.8.6, 3.9.5 and 8.4.10; also Edwards, Acts 36–39. Note that in Ionia, her statue is beside Aphrodite’s (3.6.3). Perry, “Chariton” 129. Note how, when Chaereas makes his speech of selfcondemnation, he claims that he has “taken away the crown” (1.5.4) from the dēmos. In one tradition, Kore made her descent in the Cyane spring near Syracuse, where immersion sacrifces were practiced; see Burkert, Structure 139; Diod. Sic. 4.23.4 and 5.4.2; Cic. Verr. 2.4.107; Ov. Met. 5.409–24. Note that when Callirhoe steps out of the carriage to confront Rhodogune (5.3.8–9), the crowds are dazzled, recalling the light which blazed at the revelation of the Eleusinian mysteries; see Edwards, Acts 39. On Tychē in Callirhoe, see Helms 109–12; Hunter, “History” 1062–63; Robiano. See Schmeling, Chariton 135; Scourfeld, “Anger” 175; Haynes 100; Lalanne 91–92. Temmerman 82–88, citing Rhode 527. Although anger is an epic quality: e.g., Achilles’ wrath; Scourfeld, “Anger” 166–68. This is particularly evident when Chaereas tosses himself into the sea (3.5.6), which I connect to the beginning of his virtual underworld journey. I do not think (contra MacAlister 26) that Chaereas does this as a gamble to determine the divine will. In D & C, Daphnis gives Chloe a rescued apple, recalling the tragedy-producing apple which Paris gave to Aphrodite (3.34). On the divided Medea, see Gill, Personality 216–26. We likewise see Dionysius torn between reason and emotion regarding Callirhoe (2.4–6), as is Artaxerxes (6.1.8–10). They fail to do the right action, while Callirhoe succeeds, underscoring superiority of her moral nature. That Dionysius keeps the child is not surprising; Dionysius was the father (at least he and the Great King believed so), and, according to Greek law, the child was the father’s possession. Thus, when Callirhoe was transferred to the King’s harem, the child would naturally stay with Dionysius. Further, Callirhoe had reason to fear that Dionysius might commit suicide, and, believing the child was a living link between them, she would ensure Dionysius’ life and thus the child’s security. See Kanavou, “Husband”; Schwartz, “Callirhoe’s Choice”; Garland 89–90; Egger, “Women” 263. For the city of Syracuse as a character in itself, see Bompaire 60. The names Athenagoras and Chariton appear in inscriptions in Aphrodisias; for Chariton, see CIG 2846; for Athenagoras, CIG 2748, 2782 and 2783. On Chariton and his depiction of legal procedure, see Karabélias. Iranian and Eastern traditions had a real presence in Aphrodisias and in Asia Minor; considerable evidence of the earlier Persian presence remained; see Jones, “Hellenistic History” 162.

110 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52

Chariton’s Callirhoe E.g., having Artaxerxes II contemporary with Hermocrates. Reardon, Chaereas 327; Hunter, “History” 1057–63. Veyne, Did; also Brillante 91–102. On the Cyropaedia as a didactic fctional narrative, see Stadter, “Fictional Narrative”; Tatum, Xenophon’s Imperial Fiction 36–45. Xenophon infuenced Chariton’s style and content, probably including the idealization of Artaxerxes; see Due 588–90; Reichel 6–7; Smith, Discourses 279–89. For discussion, see Luginbill; Trzaskoma. When captured, Theron, too, tells “Cretan Tales” and even pointedly mentions Odysseus’ Cephalonia (3.3.18); see Graverini, “Robbers” 99. On bandits, real and imagined, in the Roman empire, see McGing; Shaw, “Bandits.” Despite some positive qualities, such as loyalty to their masters, Callirhoe’s slaves are shown to have a fundamentally base nature and, in Ionia and Persia, exert a negative infuence; for Hunter, a major theme is the supremacy of “free men (particularly of high birth) over slaves and those of low status.” See Schmeling, Chariton 151; Hunter, “History” 1061–62; Alvares, “Some Political and Ideological Dimensions” 124. Miletus was not ruled by Persia until after the King’s peace of 386 BCE; Bartsch, Charitonroman 4. Schmeling, Chariton 145; Helms 101; Reardon, “Chariton” 329; Ruiz Montero “Caritón” 137; Jones, “Personnalité” 164. Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 116, n. 42; also MAMA 8.513. See 2.1.5, 2.5.11, 3.2.6, 4.7.6, 5.5.1, 5.9.8, 7.2.6 and 8.5.10; also Scobie 22. εὐεργέτης, κτίστας and σωτήρ often occur on inscriptions from Asia Minor; see Bowersock, Augustus 12–13, 112–13 and 118–21; Reynolds doc. 2 (line 4), doc. 30 (line 1), doc. 45a (line 4) and doc. 45b (line 5); also Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 120–21. The letter that Pharnaces writes to Artaxerxes recalls letters of appeal and recommendation sent to the emperor; see Schwartz, Courtroom Scenes 68–71. Dionysius recalls the high Greek aristocrat whose house would be ft to entertain a traveling Roman emperor like Hadrian. See 2.3.4, 2.4.1–4, 2.4.10, 2.6.3, 3.2.1, 3.2.6, 5.5.1 and 5.9.8–9; also Helms 66–75. When Dionysius receives some stunning news, a mist covers his eyes (2.7.4 and 3.1.3), recalling Hom. Il. 5.696, for Hunter a positive character indicator (“History” 1062). The rule for proper erotic lovers is one mate, for life; second marriages never work out; see Alvares, “Love” 113–14; Montiglio, “Erotic Desire” 219–20. Calling Phocas “my benefactor . . . my true guardian and most loyal supporter” (3.9.11–12). Dio was even charged with persuading a Roman governor to kill and exile his enemies; Jones, Roman World 95–114. The Great King is called philanthrōpos (5.7.1). When Artaxates makes a second attempt on Callirhoe, he frst leads her away with his right hand “as if he were fond of Greeks and all mankind” (φιλέλλην καὶ φιλάνθρωπος [6.7.5]). Callirhoe may preserve a tradition of Greek freedom from such expressions of servility; on proskynēsis in the novels, see Scott 380–83; also Scobie 23. Jones (“Hellenistic History” 91–102) argues that Miletus’ port of Dokimos (3.2.11) was named after Dokimos, a Macedonian general under Antigonos Monophthalmos, who gave the city back its autonomy in 313/312 BCE, an event so important that a new list of stephanēphoroi was begun, starting with that year in which ἡ πόλις ἐλευθέρα καὶ αὐτόνομος ἐγένετο ὑπὸ Ἀντιγόνου καὶ ἡ δημοκρατία ἀπεδόθη (marble stele from the Delphinion at Miletus [inscription 123 in Kawerau and Rehm 258–64]).

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53 Although “democracy” here often meant simply an aristocratic constitution based on rule of law, harmony and reciprocity between orders are also stressed, even if with the aim of keeping power in aristocratic hands; see Swain, Hellenism 172–74. 54 On a major frieze in Aphrodisias, the benefactor Zoilus is shown being greeted by Demos and crowned by Polis, while an inscription commemorates his dedication of a stage and proscenium to Aphrodite and the Demos; Reynolds 156– 64; Smith, Monument; Erim 137–38. 55 Homonoia was a popular literary topic in the Imperial period; see Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 114–15. Coins from Aphrodisias feature a statue of Aphrodite of Aphrodisias with the statues of other cities and the subscription homonoia; see Edwards, Religion 57 and nn. 67–69. Chariton has made Miletus’ temple to Homonoia (3.2.16) the center of a marriage custom; see Plepelits, Kallirhoe 174, n. 81; Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 114; Smith, Discourses 175–76. 56 Plutarch suggests the importance of having a Roman friend in high places (Prae. ger. reip. 814c); see Swain, Hellenism 168. 57 Despite proper arguments against Callirhoe’s presence, passion sways the Great King and his advisors (5.4.11); Dionysius later realizes the falsity of the Great King’s pretext for delaying designating who is Callirhoe’s husband (6.2.8). 58 Atticizing Greek applied terms that once detailed Persian government to Roman administration, such as the Roman emperor being called the “Great King”; see Mason, Greek Terms 157; Swain, Hellenism 176; Jones, “Personnalité” 165. 59 Hunter, “History” 1061–62. Chariton shows how Callirhoe and Artaxerxes imagine each other’s territories as places of otherness (Alvares, “Hidden Magus” 5–14). 60 Dionysius’ title as εὐεργέτης of the royal house (7.5.15 and 8.5.12) appears in Herodotus and Thucydides, along with the ὁμοτίμοι (“peers” [5.2.2 and 6.8.4]); see Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 119–21, nn. 60 and 65; Zimmermann 344–45; Plepelits, Kallirhoe 186, n. 178. 61 The satraps Mithridates and Pharnaces had often quarreled (4.6.2). The King’s advisors, coveting Mithridates’ position, attack him (4.6.5); the King feels compelled to summon him (4.6.6–7). Mithridates, when summoned, contemplates revolt (4.7.1–2). 62 Edwards, “Defning” 703–12. For other similarities between Callirhoe’s Persians and the Romans, see Baslez 202–04; also, more generally, Briant. 63 Tension between local populations and Persian overlords was common in Greco-Roman accounts of Persia; Aristides (In Rom. 17–18) calls the Persian Kings “vagrant kings” because they soon lost control of a region once they left it. 64 On the Roman emperor’s use of amici as consultants, see Millar, Emperor 223; for the conduct of trials in the palace by emperors, see Schwartz, Courtroom Scenes 80–81. 65 Karabélias 393–94. Freedmen (5.4.6) were never a part of the Persian court. On the infuence of Roman freedmen and amici, especially before Trajan, see Millar, Emperor 69–83 and 119–20; Crook 21–30; Schwartz, Courtroom Scenes 81. 66 For Greek portrayals of the Persian court, see Briant 230–35. 67 Like a Greek, Mithridates consults lawyers before the trial (5.43), with each side accompanied by supporters; Dionysius’ request that the court secretary read the supposedly forged letter (5.6.10) corresponds to Greek procedures for admitting evidence. The emphases on the proceedings’ agonistic nature and on speech and its execution are customary features of Greco-Roman legal culture; see Karabélias 373 and 393–95; Schwartz, Courtroom Scenes 80–111; Schmeling, Chariton 117–18; Alvares, “Hidden Magus” 383–84.

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68 Note Mithridates coming to Babylon immediately goes to Artaxates with “gifts”; Schwartz, Courtroom Scenes 74–76. 69 The text is somewhat corrupt here, but the reference to Tychē and the gods is reasonably clear; see Reardon, Chaereas 83, n. 84; Ruiz Montero, “Chariton” 1034. 70 See 6.3.4–8, 6.4.10 and 6.5.5; note that Artaxates encourages the King to take Callirhoe (6.3.7), and when Artaxates’ sophistries prevail during the hunt, the King immediately embraces him and says: “I am right to regard you above everyone else. You are indeed my kindest friend and true guardian” (6.4.8), which echoes Dionysius’ commendation of Phocas (3.9.11–12). 71 Such idealizations appeared in Aeschylus, Ctesias and Herodotus and continued into the imperial period; see Momigliano 123–35; Karabélias 395–96. Soon after Callirhoe (probably) appeared, there were published Pliny’s Panegyric to Trajan and Dio of Prusa’s works on the ideal Stoic–Cynic monarch; see Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 139–41; Helms 80–87 and 124; Alvares, “Some Political and Ideological Dimensions” 124–25. 72 Chariton is following the tradition of “private history” and its “effeminate barbarians” especially associated with Ctesias; see Baslez 200–01; Bartsch, Charitonroman 5; Drews 103–32. 73 Scourfeld, “Chaereas” 303 and nn. 54–55, citing Anderson, Hunting 58–63, who also mentions how hunting as a remedy for love frequently appears in Roman poetry. 74 On the destabilizing, transgressive effects of Eros upon the elite persona, see Balot. 75 See 7.1.5–11 and 7.4.2; also Schwartz, Courtroom Scenes 110–13. 76 This mercy to the Persian queen recalls the deeds of Alexander the Great. 77 Famous individuals and events of Doric history frequently inspired the rhetoric and literature of the early Empire, e.g., Plutarch’s Lives, Sayings of Famous Spartan Women, Sayings of Famous Spartan Men and The Customs of Ancient Sparta; see also Dio of Prusa’s Trojan Speech; also Bowie, “Greeks” 8; Rawson 109–15. 78 Chaereas selects only Dorians to form his contingent of crack troops and declares: “I am Greek myself, from Syracuse, of Dorian stock. We must show that we surpass the others not only in noble origin but also in courage” (7.3.8–9). In addition, I tend to think of Odysseus, in his slyness, recalls Ionian/Athenian virtues rather than Doric; thus, when the lying robber Theron produces “Cretan tales,” I suspect Chariton critiques Odysseus’ status as heroic paradigm. 79 See Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 113; Alvares, Journey 153–67. 80 In the imperial period, the boulē became the preserve of the wealthy, as membership tended to become lifelong; Jones, Greek City 171–91 and 338, n. 29; Bowersock, Augustus 88. The ekklēsia’s authority is in turn declined. But Syracuse’s ekklēsia appoints ambassadors and condemns Theron to the cross without trial (3.4.17–18) and votes citizenship for Chaereas’ soldiers (8.8.13–14). 81 On the funeral as an expression of the Syracusan social hierarchy, see Kaimio 122. 82 Hunter, “History” 1077. On the imaginary “Sophistopolis,” see Russel, Greek Declamation 21–39. 83 Hermocrates in Plutarch and Diodorus had also opposed demagogues demanding the execution of Nicias and Demosthenes (Diod. Sic. 13.19.4–5; Plut. Nic. 28.2); Hunter, “History” 1061; Billault, “De” 544–55. 84 See Jones, Greek City 164. On the difference between the value of a poor and a rich person’s testimony, see de Ste. Croix 460–61. 85 An execution consistent with classical Greek practice; Karabélias 389–90, n. 92.

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86 See 1.5.6–7, 3.3.2, 3.4.3, 3.4.15 and 8.6.2–5; also Hunter, “History” 1061 and 1077–78. 87 References to Hermocrates as victor over Athens: 1.1.1–3, 1.11.1–3, 2.6.3, 3.5.2, 5.8.7–8, 7.2.3–4 and 7.5.8. 88 See Zimmermann, 338–39; Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 120. An ἐφηβαρχεία is mentioned at Aphrodisias; see MAMA 8.410. 89 Dionysius fears an invasion by Hermocrates (3.2.8); see Smith, Discourses 188. 90 Zimmermann, “Chariton” 343; Plepelits, Kallirhoe 17–18; Temmerman 92–94. 91 Thus the Homeric quote, τύπτε δ̓ ἐπιστροφάδην· τῶν δὲ στόνος ὤρνυτ̓ ἀεικής (7.4.6), recalling Diomedes slaughtering the Thracians (Hom. Il. 10.483). 92 Alvares, “Egyptian Unrest” 18–19. Nerva and Trajan honored philosophers to present themselves as anti-Domitians; Whitmarsh, Greek Literature 157–58. 93 Note Chaereas proposes marrying off his sister to Polycharmus without even bothering to consult his father (8.8.13). 94 Chaereas does not intend to tell the whole story, but the Syracusans want to hear everything, and Hermocrates encourages him not even to omit the embarrassing parts (8.7.4). The people want to hear, in a sense, Chaereas’ fake news. 95 This phrase can also be found in Suet. Iul. 32, Petron. Sat. 122, line 174, and App. B. civ. 2.5.35, and it seems to have originated with Menander (Ath. 13.559e). 96 On more sympathetic views of Theron, see Smith, Discourses 92–93; Schmeling, Chariton 106–07; Helms 88. I agree that Theron is a substantial character, but this does not prove that Chariton intends the reader to approve his actions; rather, it is often easier for authors to make interesting villains than heroes, e.g., Milton’s Lucifer. 97 Recall how in the aftermath of Callirhoe’s theft, even greater riches are brought to Syracuse, since Chaereas has plundered the Persians. Perhaps, we have here a coded dream, in which the despoliations of the Romans could be reversed, and the tide of luck turned back to the Greeks. 98 Some of the Greek elite recognized that Rome’s suzerainty kept them in power; note Plutarch’s comments that the Greeks perhaps have as much freedom as their rulers (the Romans) let them, and “perhaps more would not be better for them . . .” (Prae. ger. reip. 824c); Alvares, “Some Political and Ideological Dimensions” 120. 99 See Liviabella Furiani, “Di” 48; also Egger, Women 189–90. 100 See Hunter, “History” 1080, citing Ameling. 101 Konstan 73–79; also Fusillo, Romanzo 186–96. 102 Although Callirhoe has some affection for Dionysius; Helms 28–37; Schmeling, Chariton 203; Egger, Women 180–85. 103 See Alvares, “Perspective” 5–14; my views have now changed somewhat. 104 Chaereas never straightforwardly considers her sōphrōn, although the narrator and other characters do; see Temmerman 59. 105 Although such baggage trains, well supplied with luxuries, are a stock feature of Greek descriptions of Persian warfare. 106 Seneca, as preserved in Jer. Adv. Iovinian. 1.44, tells how Artemisia was famed for loving her dead husband as if alive, and constructing such an amazing tomb in his honor that all large tombs are called Mausolea; see Dressler 157. 107 Plepelits, Kallirhoe 28; Reardon, “Chariton” 314–15; Whitmarsh, “Greek Novel” 590 and 600. 108 Note her speech to Dionysius invokes his paideia as a spur to return her to Syracuse (2.5.11); Temmerman 52; Daude 198.

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109 In Heliodorus, when Charikleia hears from Persinna’s tania of her true origins, the responsibilities of her eugeneia motivate behavioral changes. 110 Fusillo, Romanzo 20; Briand 24–27; Temmerman 51–56. 111 On Callirhoe possibly refecting a Sybaritia, see Tilg, Chariton 147. 112 Callirhoe pours dirt on her head (3.10.4) like Achilles on learning of the death of Patroclus Hom. Il. 18.22–24), whose need for a tomb Dionysius evokes (4.1.3). 113 The text at this point is lacunose, but the general sense of what must have happened is clear; see Goold 357; also Hilberg 695–57. 114 One possible clue that matters will go wrong. Callirhoe, thinking she has lost Chaereas and seeking mercy from Aphrodite, imagines the child returning to Syracuse and doing better than his parents, so people say “Hermocrates’ grandson is greater than he” (3.8.8), recalling Hector’s futile prayer about Astyanax (Hom. Il. 6.476–81).

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Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe1

Probably less than a century older, Callirhoe differs considerably from Longus’ Daphnis Chloe (D & C), a popular text in its time, with a signifcant afterlife.2 It is the most escapist of the extant Greek romantic novels, set in a semi-idyllic pastoral world, conveying a sense of the ideals of a forgotten world.3 Longus’ superfcially simple story offers many hypostases of meaning: realistic, pornographic, religious, artistic and utopian (Reardon, “Μῦθος” 135–36). Congruent with Second Sophistic aesthetics, D & C self-consciously refects upon its own production and interpretation. The various narrated myths and stories within stories present a powerful cast of fctional (and often familiar) identities and perspectives (Whitmarsh, Narrative 256). D & C experimentally negotiates its way through various dialectics of nature, country and wilderness, of mythos and logos and of truth and falsehood (Zeitlin, “Gardens”), employing iconic fragments and themes from Greek myth, pastoral, New Comedy, lyric poetry and Platonic philosophy to produce the impression of a sublime engagement with a vision of a more harmonious and nature-connected society, which could inspire the reader’s dream-fantasy that such harmonies might be reborn, as well as true love among romantic couples. Indeed, because of its dense intertextuality4 and manipulation of literary conventions, its multiple implied authors and readings as well as a sense of a belated summation of a vast tradition (Zeitlin, “Poetics”), its interpretation is bound up in readerly perspectives. In a letter from 1831, Goethe declared D & C a masterpiece, while Rhode (549) thought it revolting pornography. Winkler, considering D & C, compared himself to an anthropologist (Constraints 104); I would suggest resemblance to a psychotherapist with a sophisticated literary-critical bent. D & C shares with its stepparent pastoral (for Longus sees himself as a pastoral writer)5 the superpositioning of contradictions, such as between a supposedly simple depiction of nature and elaborate authorial artifce. D & C is a ludic text, which plays its serious games (as Theocritus, Vergil and other pastoral writers did) in the spirit of a comedy of innocence and the community of persons, time and nature which informs pastoral,6 where the non-innocent world is never forgotten. Yet, at the same time, it is exceptional in its overt and even more covert didactic program (Morgan, “Erotika” 188). DOI: 10.4324/9781003036647-4

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While in Callirhoe the pursuit of love drives the protagonists’ historical success, D & C provides impressive evidence for how Greco-Roman culture thought about desire, its pleasures and obstacles, as well as the nature of sexual identity and the relations between the sexes in their social contexts (Zeitlin, “Poetics” 419). The utopian dream of D & C, adapted from pastoral and myths of marvelous children, is that the protagonists recover an understanding of eros and the productions of desire in something like their original innocence in the countryside, a suffcient foundation so that they can gain further experience through their struggles without losing an essential idealness of behavior and perspective. Finally, having confronted the basic conficts and contradictions of being adults embedded in society, they can create a resolution on the social and personal levels which restores a lost unity and thus benefts their society.

Author, time and settings and the implied reader Almost nothing secure is known of Longus himself.7 His supposed name is Roman, but such names were common among non-Romans too. Although “Longus” occurs on inscriptions, no frm evidence exists he was from Lesbos,8 and there are substantial literary reasons for this setting. Such contextual facts as the Lesbian city-states being independent, their ability to make war on each other and their style of warfare put the novel’s setting somewhere in the Classical to Hellenistic periods. Yet the absentee landlord Dionysophanes like Chariton’s Dionysius with his landed wealth recalls the high empire more than Classical Greece (Saïd 93–94). The implied readers of Longus are certainly literarily and rhetorically educated pepaideumenoi (Lauwers 53–60).9

The maturity of the novel The era of Longus and Achilles Tatius10 saw the high summer of the Second Sophistic, whose infuence continues with Heliodorus. D & C seems less inclined to follow genre conventions than the other extant novels, although there may have been other pastoral novels.11 Achilles Tatius in his Leukippe and Kleitophon ( L & K) employs plot elements familiar to the Greek ideal novel, sometimes grotesquely, often with encyclopedic digressions, and rhetorical debates and exotic travelogue commentary, while in Longus, these same elements are decidedly (sometimes comically) trimmed down.12 Both works deal extensively with the maturation of the protagonists and their relationship to normative erotic experience and Greek paideia. In D & C, the protagonists, native Greeks, succeed despite a lack of paideia, while in L & K the oversophisticated Kleitophon, a Tyrian, becomes a proper hero despite his paideia. Both narratives begin with an ekphrasis, whose narrators have opposite attitudes toward the story they tell—Longus’ frame narrator is ecstatic and visionary, while Kleitophon seems pensive, troubled,

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 117 and the reader wonders if the expected happy-ever-after ending occurred. Both novels contain discourses on the nature of love. L & K’s narrative sprawl seems to lead nowhere, although, as in D & C, there are intimations of higher truths. D & C explicitly makes the protagonists’ erotic maturation from childish innocence to a married couple the central plot development, with nearly all the other elements serving that end. Both novels have strong Platonic undercurrents, especially in linking the erotic to the visual (Zeitlin, “Longus” 407). The far different moral perspectives of the two novels are observed in the very different conditions under which Daphnis has initiatory sex with Lycaenion, and Kleitophon has consolatory jailhouse sex with Melite.13 Unlike the novels of Chariton and Xenophon, sex between the protagonists must wait until they have made the needed psychological and spiritual changes, which the adventures motivate.

D & C and anagogy The prologue makes lofty claims for D & C’s therapeutic and educational powers and offers an ostensibly positive view of Eros, looking forward to how Daphnis and Chloe will move from seeing love as a sickness to a veneration of Eros the shepherd (Morgan, “Nymphs” 177). Yet how justifed is that claim, considering details which can verge on the parodic or banal (Reardon, “Μῦθος” 139 ff.)? Longus dramatizes how love involves a complicated negotiation between two objectivities and two dimly understood subjectivities, those aspects of the lover visible to your eyes or constituted by custom or language, the lover of your fears and fantasies and the lover as the lover understands himself or herself, a subtle matter easier to point to in mythos than to describe in logos. One can see no truly realistic characters or situations there, for “realism in Longus . . . is essentially a literary means of attaining a highly literary end” (Reardon, “Μῦθος” 145). Longus’ very serious reading of Eros and his productions are not meant to cancel out the non-serious (comic, sentimental or even parodic) readings, the tension between these two elements aligned with our human condition.

The problematical narrator The beginnings of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and D & C14 both present imperfect narrators offering tales of transformation, education and even salvation, with Apuleius’ product more problematical. In Longus’ prologue, the implied “I” is likewise an authorly construct,15 a narrator of a story whose full signifcances elude him.16 Indeed, because D & C is ostensibly the work of a narrator inspired by an exegete’s tale of the history behind the painting, readers should suspect that, like the narrator, they will have to work out a fuller interpretation of what they read, and even to “read against the author’s grain” (Morgan, Daphnis 19). Both Longus and Apuleius blend realism17 and fantasy and raise questions concerning their status as works of

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fction and the signifcance of fction itself (Morgan, “Daphnis” 73 ff.); to rephrase Lauwers (65), the prologue implies its own lector intende, promising the reader pleasure, but also encouraging an expectation of deeper meanings concealed in an apparently simple fable.

The infamous prologue As the Homeric prooimion sets up major themes, so does D & C’s prologue,18 which, as noted, rather resembles Apuleius’ in its complexity and how it sets up reader’s relationship with sophistic literary practice. The prologue reveals the frame narrator’s cultural capital as that of a pepaideumenos theatēs, as well as the capital of its implied reader. Note that Longus describes the initial ekphrasis as if it detailed an iconic mythological or literary episode, such as concern the Imagines of Philostratus. The reader would probably recognize that the frame narrator and the entire prologue-tale about hunting, the shrine, the painting, the exegete and his reasons for writing the novel are purely fctional, while also recognizing elements recalling pastoral, archaic lyric, the Greek ideal novel, Athenian/Ionian historiography and even pan-Mediterranean folktale patterns—all part of a living tradition which D & C employs. Longus’ sensuous word-music promises to entertain while also teaching of Love; L & K’s prologue implies the same, and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses hints at this too. Like epic, D & C comprises episodes that are not all strictly erotic, but encompass many aspects of the cycle of life (e.g., women giving birth), myths of marvelous children (children being exposed and raised by others) and romance (pirates). It was a known Greek custom to make elaborate dedications at shrines to declare how the deity helped the worshipper; thus, the painting may narrate the saving works of Pan and the nymphs in conjunction with Eros in the protagonists’ life. And note, like the major shrines of Apollo, Asclepius, Demeter and Kore, which concern Pausanias, people come even from abroad to worship there. The frame narrator offers a model for Longus’ implied reader, one being sentimental about nature and love and capable of suspending his worldly experience to commune with Longus’ imaginative vision. He or she appreciates the work’s dense interweaving of venerable textual references rather in the spirit Pausanias viewed the fragments of the Hellenic past: as being a source of pleasure, insight or wish fulfllment. There is enough detail in the painting (e.g., pirates) that the reader might expect to read items similar to those of other Greek romantic novels, although the title’s names suggest adventures suited to a pastoral background (Lauwers 64–66). The unnamed prologue narrator describes how while hunting, like the transgressive Methymnaean youths, he unexpectedly came upon a sacralized locus amoenus, a pastoral space evoking the rustic peacefulness of Theocritean pastoral (Park 259). That he stops to examine the cave shrine suggests that, like the pepaideumenoi whom Pausanias addresses, he is drawn

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 119 to venerable sites of ancient beauty. This pilgrimage site is that popular cave shrine to the nymphs where the abandoned Chloe was found (an important locus for subsequent plot events), which Daphnis and Chloe subsequently embellish. There he encountered the most beautiful sight he has ever seen, a wondrous grove containing a painted picture presenting a history of love, which only loosely fts the ensuing narrative (MacQueen, Myth 21; Morgan, Daphnis 207). The problematical interpretation of eikonos graphēn19 places the image several removes from reality or, conversely, it may be seen as a direct referent to a higher spiritual reality (Herrmann 216–18). The shrine’s exegete then supplies the sacred tale explaining the picture.20 The frame narrator is seized by a longing (pothos)21 to write something in response (recalling how the Phaedrean lover is affected by the sight of the beautiful boy, recalling the Form of Beauty), which, as noted, recalls that desire to verbally respond to beauty seen in Lucian’s De domo. Here, it refects a desire to create a logos that captures what is (for the narrator) the essential truth of inescapable Love, in which task the frame narrator will fulfll the Platonic goal of giving birth in beauty. Indeed, he may here consider himself a spokesman for Eros,22 which, in a different way, Kleitophon becomes. As noted, the frame narrator produces a ktēma terpnon whose sweetness, harmony and even musicality,23 offer that pleasure which Thucydides (1.22) rejected. It paradoxically contains what is educational and therefore useful,24 as unexpectedly romantic love (here) will lead to bliss instead of to the traditional tragedy. The frame narrator’s story, like the earlier dedication which Daphnis and Chloe made, is a testament to desire’s force, a celebration of the saving power of Eros and a guide to others. The frame narrator’s prayer to retain sōphrosynē could be a plea to keep his thoughts chaste while dealing with potentially pornographic material.25 The more sensitive soul might fear violating the shrine’s proprieties, a real temptation, since the locus amoenus is both pure and enticing.26 Hunter suggests that here the author fashions himself something of a demotic Socrates who, worried that he might lose his sōphrosynē as Socrates did in his second speech on Love in the Phaedrus, now makes his own dedication to the potentially possessing god through this text.27 One can also view the narrator as one who has been saved from a life of aggressive hunting and dissolute sophistry, who has been awakened, through the experience of a sublime and erotically infused object of the iconic Greek past, to values he has lost, and thus, he makes a dedication to the gods who have rescued him and wants to promote the rescue of others too.

Mythic paradigms The overriding archetype of D & C is that of the “marvelous child” which incorporates the quest to fnd one’s potential and identity, the pursuit of an ideal mate, the motifs of the breaking of evil customs, and the creation of a

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new model for society from Comedy. The children are born from higher beings28 (leading aristocrats Dionysophanes and Megacles), and due to some prior evil involving their own parents, they lose their birthright and identity (their parents exposed them in the countryside for fairly selfsh reasons), are miraculously saved (due to the intervention of a goat and a sheep) and are raised in (relative) pastoral innocence, one with strong intimations of the primitive rural paradise, their childhood innocence reproducing humankind’s primordial guiltlessness. Their union conforms to the pattern in which a special mortal marries/unites with a goddess. Chloe is closely identifed with the nymphs, and she is discovered in the nymphs’ cave and watched over by them. Often a price is paid by the male who would be consort to goddess, and, as I show, Dorcon symbolically pays that price, both attempting to violate the goddess and being redeemed by her in death. Eros tells the Methymnian general Bryaxis that Eros is making a myth of Chloe, which will become the text of D & C, where Chloe will have a better fate than do the other three nymphs. Daphnis, in turn, functions as a kind of divine youth who must prove himself worthy of the goddess and of his position as rustic prophet and divine herdsman. Images such as Daphnis holding his two goats to make an oath (2.39) or appearing as a young Apollo (4.13.2) underscore this status; the apotheosis of Daphnis in Vergil’s sixth Eclogue likewise reveals this potential (Park 269). I shall show how Chloe is not completely erased, but retains a fundamental importance for Daphnis and the countryside. I argue that Books 1 and 2 establish symbolic-mythical roles for Daphnis and Chloe in the countryside’s spiritual economy, and, this done, these roles become in Book 3 integrated with cultural and economic roles (marriage and the husband’s superiority) and in Book 4 with wider class and historical roles. D & C’s pastoral world increasingly becomes a place of threat and trial, with intimations of a dangerous bower of bliss. Early Daphnis falls into a pit and is pulled out using Chloe’s breastband and Dorcon’s strength (1.12). The goat he falls upon is killed, as Dorcon is hacked to death by pirates later. It can be argued that both symbolically die for Daphnis, who is raised up using Chloe’s breastband, symbolizing the power of the ideal feminine, while, as we shall see, Dorcon dies the death of the transgressive consort of the Nymph. Daphnis passes a series of initiatory hurdles, such as his contest with Dorcon and his self-defense at the trial over which Philetas presides, as well as in his struggles to marry Chloe. This initiation theme is seen most clearly when Philetas gives Daphnis his pipes after he proves his musical mastery and when Lycaenion initiates him sexually.29 Daphnis is, despite himself, something of a hero and not without exceptional actions. Daphnis’ passiveness allows for a less aggressive and domineering form of love; it also allows for the operations of the gods to grant sanction to their marriage. Daphnis and Chloe’s implicit quest is to fnd out what Love is, knowledge needed so that the protagonists’ love can be properly consummated, as well as one concerning their true identities and the revelation of

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 121 their transformative potentials. This tale’s archetypal actors and settings recall a foundational myth,30 ftting the protagonists’ status as marvelous children destined to be transformative agents.

The ideal pastoral myth As noted, the pastoral setting recalls Hesiod’s Golden Age, and the story of Daphnis and Chloe can also be read as a myth about the development of civilization and the (re)discovery of proper sexual love.31 Eros is conducting an experiment in love, like Psammetichus’ attempt to fnd humanity’s original tongue (Hdt. 2.2). All the happenings, from the children’s exposure and rescue to the fnal recognition of Chloe and the couple’s marriage, are part of Eros’ master plan,32 that aristocratic youth of excellent pedigree should learn of love and its practices in something like its original innocence within the pastoral world, where, protected by the rural gods, they will only gradually be introduced to urban culture and its amatory problematics, until their aristocratic origins are revealed and they are wed, creating together a new hybrid and improved form of behavior and social life for urbanites and rustics alike, including a form of love lacking the violence implied in the myths of Phatta, Syrinx and Echo (MacQueen, Myth 82–97). Daphnis and Chloe are Eros’ second project; Eros earlier watched over Amyrillis and Philetas (2.5.3), who, now retired, cultivates his garden and supervises the pastoral milieu.33 Eros then begins watching over Daphnis and Chloe. The protagonists’ education in the countryside, a relatively protected locus amoenus, coordinates with the pastoral genre; the return and recognition of the hero and the creation of a new society in Book 4 coordinate with New Comedy,34 engaging urban reality and its ideologies, disturbing the rustic cosmos.35 As the romance of the countryside and its population, D & C corresponds to Frye’s fourth phase of comedy and romance, in which an ideal society must be defended and extended. Congruent with Frye’s ffth phase, Longus’ frame narrator stresses his tale’s universality (Hunter, “Longus, Daphnis” 378). The couple’s erotic maturation is paralleled by their social maturation, also coordinated with the increasing invasions of the countryside by the city folk: frst the Tyrian pirates, then the Methymnaean youths, then the Methymnaean naval forces, then Lycaenion and fnally Dionysophanes’ party. The telos of New Comedy, and thus of D & C, conforms to Frye’s meta-genre of Comedy; thus, Daphnis is more lucky than heroic, and, as in comedy, the antagonists are more deluded and socially deformed than truly evil, and the triumph is that of a restored festive society. The various recognitions represent the breaking of illusions and the baleful Word of the Father. Daphnis and Chloe’s exposure by their parents is transformed into a felix culpa, as these past horrors are rewritten by later events—developments which, as at Heliodorus’ Meroe, restore a broken family and bring potential benefts to the wider community through marriage and the couple’s assumption of their proper social position. Daphnis and Chloe’s wedding (4.38),

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which combines city and country folk and customs and where even animals participate, echoes the reformed, inclusive and festal world of apocalyptic/ eschatological narrative. Ostensible villains, such as the seductress Lycaenion and the parents of Dorcon, are likewise welcome, and the kidnapper Lampis plays for them. Fittingly, this occurs at a time linked with the vintage and Dionysos, a god who breaks down the alienating boundaries between persons and the natural world and other individuals. This new model for society will continue, as the couple, once married, divide their time between city and country and make sure their children are given pastoral names and suckled by animals as they once were (4.39).

Background to Longus’ pastoral world Longus creates and maintains an extensive pastoral world36 with pronounced links to the city. Contrasts between city and country, especially between country’s simplicity and urban decadence, form a common theme in Greco-Roman and later European literature, including rhetoric (Hunter, Study 66–67 and n. 29);37 see Longus’ near contemporary Dio of Prusa as well as Alciphron, whose Athenian shepherds piously sacrifce all they can afford (2.33).38 Some even sought in the countryside some vestige of ancient practice, as Herodes Atticus saw in his encounter with Agathion/Sostratus (Gatz 131–32); others thought the peasant farmer recalled the Golden Age. Second Sophistic artisans knew the connection in Greek culture, dating back to Hesiod, between the shepherd and the poet (Gutzwiller, “Bucolic Problem” 386). Further, pastoral has always merged the imaginary worlds of simple shepherds with sophisticated content, including the political. D  &  C’s interplay between the natural and art raises complex questions about representation and mimesis,39 such interplay being a characteristic of pastoral as well as of New Comedy. Reproducing pastoral’s sentimental vision of an archaic country paradise is part of Longus’ project; the various idealizing elements (amatory Eros frst of all), but also mythical patterns, depictions of religion, philosophy, the relationship between art and nature, education and so forth—all iconic, sublime fragments of the Greek cultural past work to create this vision. Dio’s Euboean Oration, one of the era’s many works which showed an increased interest in country life,40 contextualizes D & C’s praise of country life against urban corruption (Jones, Roman World 56–61). Dio, during his exile, trying to cross over from Chios to mainland Greece, was shipwrecked by a storm (just as Achilles Tatius’ frame narrator is) and ended up in the wild hollows of Euboea. He is given fne hospitality by a poor hunter who works land abandoned after its owner was executed by the emperor. The hunter recounts how he was forced to visit a city (probably Carystos) to defend himself before the civic assembly against the charge of farming public land without paying rent. There is palpable evidence of urban decline, with much good land unused, and widened social divisions. The urban rhetor’s

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 123 increasingly virulent accusations show the fear and contempt many city dwellers had for country folk. The oration’s second half contains direct attacks on urban life and its wasteful occupations, especially regarding prostitution, with proposals to encourage the farming of abandoned land, points marking the speech’s philosophic and ethical intent. A similar philosophic interest is observed in D & C’s prologue. Pastoral41 itself is the sophisticate’s refection upon his world (being always in the background as an antithesis), through an apparent retreat into a simpler life informed with the beautiful, harmonious and aesthetically agreeable, with the sentimental dream that these beauties could be natural, the world more human, that the aesthetic art has brought out a preexisting beauty compatible with human sensibilities. One can see the reader’s interaction with “soft” pastoral rather like the commodifed (and sanitized) experience of the countryside provided by the rural Dionysia for Dionysophanes’s party, an admittedly superfcial, but pleasant, experience. Through an art that constantly, densely and self-consciously imitates art (especially prior texts) as well as nature,42 Longus’ world gains the aura of the natural, not natural as a mimesis of nature-as-it-is, but rather the natural as a distillation of human art.43 Longus’ vivid descriptions of the pastoral landscape highlight the pastoral art’s “regenerative power to recapture a lost sympathy between man and nature, a lost harmony between intellect and feeling, a paradisal garden where the tree of life stands and love and innocence can coexist” (Segal, Poetry 12).44 Likewise, important is the convention that pastoralists cultivate a more natural set of art forms, including bucolic poetry, where illiterate shepherds exude arcane knowledge and where the pain of love and life is transfgured into art. Frye notes: In the pastoral, man is at peace with nature, which implies that he is also at peace with his own nature, the reasonable and the natural being associated. . . . In the second place, the pastoral, by simplifying human desires, throws more stress on the satisfaction of such desires as remain, especially, of course, sexual desire. (Stubborn Structure 126) Pastoral often conveys a nostalgic longing for childhood simplicity, projected into the natural, rural landscape (Morgan, Daphnis 12–13), but, as recent scholarship shows, pastoral is not an escape from awareness of the limits and evils of life; it is simply a different way of confronting them,45 and Longus’ city-country contrast is nuanced (Saïd 98–104). In D & C’s countryside, the intrinsically superior protagonists gain a foundation in a presexual, idealized form of friendship and education, which establishes a bond between themselves, nature and its gods and which will help them correctly obtain further knowledge and a proper experience of eros, and then much else, until they are ready to gain from the urbanites other equally fundamental lessons. Longus substitutes a detailed trip though the seasons for the

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long wanderings though various lands found in other novels; for Daphnis and Chloe, new learning comes with each season. The servant who took Daphnis to the countryside was named by Dionysophanes Sophrosyne, which Courier emended to Sophrone. Herrmann (226) correctly accepts the original reading, because, taken to the countryside, Daphnis will gain a form of sōphrosynē unavailable in the city. D & C is structured as a progressive series of initiations involving the gods and human society, ending with Daphnis’ fnal initiation of Chloe. The pastoral countryside can furnish, at least for the ideal protagonists, a kind of initiation within an imaginative locus amoenus, where Beauty as an immanent force can be experienced, and a vigorously reproductive nature, which can (in theory) be imitated, as well as nature’s gods. Longus’ Daphnis story is a deliberate rewriting of Theocritus’ wellknown narratives, with nods to other elements of the Daphnis tradition. As Halperin has stressed, there is considerable difference between Theocritus’ early “bucolic” verse and productions of the later pastoral tradition, as well as considerable disagreement about how “bucolic” Theocritean “bucolic” actually is (Halperin; Gutzwiller, “Bucolic Problem” 390–93). Early Theocritean pastoral is anarchic, for the shepherds seem to be fairly autonomous in their apolitical locus amoenus; Vergil breaks that spell of independence, as does Longus, but more gently. There is a long tradition of quasi-divine shepherds who have a special relationship with the gods or are beloved of nymphs (Berg 12), starting with the Mesopotamian Dumuzi, beloved by Ishtar, along with Adonis/Attis/Tammuz and their relationships with Astarte/Cybele as well as stories of Anchises and Paris who had affairs with a mother goddess, Aphrodite or the Nymphs. I suspect Theocritus, while not reproducing any specifc ancient middle Eastern narrative, has constructed his Daphnis to recall Adonis (an object of Hellenistic poetry), and thus, Longus’ Daphnis carries a certain religious aura of the middle Eastern shepherd god, passive and loveable, who is connected to the landscape, but dies tragically and is universally mourned. Greek authors from Theocritus onward presented Daphnis as the paradigmatic pastoral fgure (Berg 11, citing Desport). The fact that the goat neglects her own kid to nourish Daphnis suggests Daphnis’ special role in the spiritual ecology of the natural world; in a similar way, in Christian legends animals dote on the infant Jesus in the manger. The origins of Daphnis himself are varied, and Longus refects some of the pre-Theocritean tradition, where Daphnis was the son of Hermes and a nymph, exposed in a pastoral location (perhaps in a laurel tree) and raised by shepherds, or in some cases, Nymphs.46 Theocritus’ Daphnis is a divine herdsman whose death touches on the deep mysteries of life, a “genius of the landscape” whose presence designates a unity between the elements of the human and natural world and whose death is thus universally mourned.47 Timaeus, as related by Parthenius, also makes Daphnis Hermes’ son, living in Sicily, tending cattle and generally avoiding human company (Larson 79).

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 125 Eventually, a nymph falls in love with him and forbids him to love another woman. For a long while he does, until another woman seduces him, and he is blinded for this transgression. Stesichorus, referred to in Aelianus (VH 10.18 = PMGF 279), claims this blinding was the inspiration for the frst bucolic poetry. In other versions, Daphnis marries a nymph or pines away in love for one or even dies (sometimes by falling off a cliff, as Longus’ Daphnis threatens to jump off a cliff [4.22.2]) and becomes a stream. Theocritus’ Daphnis appears to have rejected the goddess of love (as Gilgamesh did) and is dying (not blinded) due to her revenge—the cause is obscure, although it is probably due to his inability to cease loving combined with his unwillingness to give in to love.48 As the story of Enkidu makes clear, a full relation between a man and nature and a man and woman is mutually exclusive, and the Daphnis of Theocritus Idyll 1 may choose death over the loss of his union with nature. The fact that the love story of Daphnis and Chloe is so closely coordinated with the seasonal alteration also suggests the symbolic nature of their amatory union. One notes how the noble Daphnis of Idyll 1 is rather different from homoerotic Daphnis of Idyll 6 and, in turn, quite different from the Daphnis of Idyll 9, who delights in his defeat of Menalcas, or Daphnis the seducer of Idyll 27. These are all “possible Daphnises” serving as backdrop to Longus’ Daphnis. Pastoral love, however sentimentally portrayed, often has a sad,49 even tragic and violent (and perverse) element to it, which Longus largely avoids. For Alpers, the experience of loss and separation and the act of coming together to mourn for that loss are the foundations of pastoral. Longus’ Daphnis challenges older myths and Theocritean pastoral, being representative of the natural world, yet a non-tragic one. Instead of showing the limits of pastoral when confronting modern life, Longus doubles down on the ideal, borrowing elements from New Comedy and the Greek ideal novel, showing the pastoral vision as overcoming the tragic elements of human life and presenting a more utopian model for human society, a bit like the pastoral of Morris’ News From Nowhere. While the frame narrator idealizes the countryside, presumably limited by experiential, temperamental and ideological factors,50 he shows condescension and even contempt toward it.51 Cowherds and other herdsmen had reputation for being lazy and easily beguiled or distracted from their duties (Gutzwiller, “Bucolic Problem” 384). The very word agroikia (“rustic life”) is linked to an inability to appreciate beauty or culture. The beauty of Daphnis and Chloe was “too fne for the countryside” (1.7.1), yet we never see the city dwellers making music or any other beautiful production. Similarly, Theocritean pastoral allows much non-ideal, even reprehensible, behavior to its inhabitants, and Longus likewise shows many non-ideal aspects of country life, including coarse elements unknown to Theocritus, such as parents exploiting children for dowries and the threatened torture of slaves. Being in the countryside but not of it, the protagonists will evade some of the traps the countryside’s customs poses. At least until the city folk arrive, the pastoralists ignore the image maintenance that a Dionysophanes

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requires; a male’s emotive obsession with love, quite problematical in proper Greek elite society, is taken for granted in the pastoral world; in some ways, Chloe’s behavior recalls the independent, even liberated, courtesans of Lucian and Alciphron (Funke 183; also Dalmeyda), not that of an aristocratic Greek girl. The elite Greek male protagonists of other romantic novels are entangled in the demands of institutions such as the ephebate, and they worry about bringing public shame on their families. No such worries trouble Daphnis. Not that rural values are lacking; when Dorcon presents himself as a possible husband for Chloe, as will Daphnis, they both emphasize concrete pastoral skills and forms of wealth. Pastoral’s static quality is faulted as displaying no action applicable to the reader’s world.52 In D & C’s pastoral world, love and desire are simply forces of nature, and the denizens of pastoral, being more immersed in nature, are more able to obey the laws of nature and thus enjoy a more natural (if not always more idyllic) form of love, being protected by their rustic gods. The usual threats—rivals, pirates, war—are downplayed in D  &  C, for the real threat comes from the forces of social convention and various forms of the Big Other, and the protagonists’ real adventures are found in proper erotic maturation, the transition from innocence to experience. And the mythic paradigm of the hero’s maturation and triumph, coupled with the seasonal progression, gives a forward motion which naturally leads to the New Comic plot developments of Book 3 and especially in Book 4. Longus’ novel constitutes a refounding of the pastoral world, frst by singing a new song of Daphnis and making the new mythos of Chloe. But the myths of Phatta,53 Syrinx and Echo54 are also presented as origin myths for the pastoral world whose beauty is built upon a disturbing foundation of the silencing, oppression and sacrifce of musical females. But D & C is comedy, not epic or tragedy, and a better arrangement comes out of these horrors. Longus’ infant Daphnis is found in a locus amoenus rich in pastoral associations (Park 260), a lush grove of oaks (oaks are associated with Zeus; later, when Daphnis is recognized, sacrifce is made to Zeus Soter), where he, like Zeus, is suckled by a goat. But instead of a Daphnis who scorns human company and is destroyed by an offended love god, in part so that Daphnis will acknowledge the love-god’s power, Longus’ Daphnis is taught how to love through the actions of the gods and wants nothing more than to acknowledge that love-god’s power. Instead of dying to universal lament, he marries in a wedding with universal, apocalyptic connotations. Instead of becoming a stream, he fnds one, called “Daphnis’ stream.” Chloe, closely identifed with the nymphs, is found in an even more symbolically rich space, a venerable cave which even then was a rustic shrine with crude statues of the Nymphs, with a fgure of Pan nearby. The Nymphs and Pan are quintessential countryside deities, existing in opposition to the city, another reason to see their subsequent country life following the demands of Chloe’s nature. The shepherd’s offerings acknowledge the nymphs as the powers over the fertility of their land.55 The nymph-infused pastoral world, being

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 127 a character in its own right, constitutes a protective parent-educator of the couple.56 The parents, in giving their children pastoral names, acknowledge the pastoral world’s role in producing and guiding them (Park 266–69). Thus, the narrative of Longus’ Daphnis also reverses the usual account of man’s liaison with a nature nymph being baleful. When Daphnis and Chloe mime their improved version of the Syrinx story, Daphnis the new master musician and Chloe the virtual nymph present pastoral-infected visions of a new romantic and social life. Daphnis would have been a character in the exegete’s story. Again, Second Sophistic authors often sought a communion with fgures of the remote past (e.g., Dictys, Dares and Palamedes) who could then set the historical record straight. Is it part of Longus’ literary game to suggest that his narrator, traveling in a backward corner of Greece, came across the “True Story of Daphnis,” perhaps a corrective to Theocritus? Note how Vergil depicted Daphnis as a foundational rustic god to whom sacrifce is made, who brings good to the world by simply existing, and in his ffth Eclogue, Daphnis not only dies, but achieves apotheosis57 and is considered the founder of a Bacchic cult.58 He becomes the loving deity who brings peace to the entire pastoral world as well as inspiration to poets. But instead of pushing Daphnis toward greater divinity, Longus keeps him human, yet still a quasidivinized shepherd poet who functions in the context of the city and its aristocracy. Vergil in the Eclogues dealt with the impotence of poetry, love and nature in the face of power and passion. More like Vergil than Theocritus, Longus underscores the dependence of the country upon the city, stressing that the pastoral version of love is not enough to deal with serious issues of social and political power. But Longus suggests that, once upon a time, as commemorated in the painting, the forces of love, nature and nature’s gods could have gotten the upper hand over these extra-pastoral forces. Because of the basic humanity of Daphnis, in contrast to the more palpable divinity of the Daphnis of Theocritus and Vergil, readers could more easily see themselves as imitators of Daphnis. In the Symposium, Agathon dedicated his speech to Eros (Pl. Symp. 197e), and Socrates asks his audience to see his speech as an encomium to Eros (Gillespie 423–24). Longus’ frame narrator’s preface likewise suggests aretalogy, and in this recalls Apuleius’ Lucius-narrator who tells a sophistic story, one of whose attractions is, as Winkler notes, a dream of saving religious knowledge. The mythic-religious universe of D & C is a totality organized by a provident Eros with a harmony recalling Plato’s ideal cosmic music, being able to accommodate the emotional, imaginative and rational aspects of humanity. Thus, Longus’ depictions of Eros blend notions of the cosmogonic Eros of Hesiod, various Greek philosophers and minor Orphic overtones59 with the less serious depictions of Eros as Aphrodite’s winged arrow-bearing mischievous child. Ever since Homer, art and eros have been united to bring pleasure and persuasion; an eros-infused art may be the best educator (Gillespie 425); certainly, Eros is behind the creative process

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of Longus’ novel (Park 276). A reproductive god, like Lucretius’ Venus, Longus’ Eros is more powerful than the major gods, older than creation, functioning in the divine, human and natural realms. The force of Desire aroused by beauty is so powerful that nature itself seems driven by Desire; during the early summer, the apples were falling to the ground through love and the Sun due to a love of beauty was making everybody take their clothes off (1.23). His baleful qualities are somewhat elided,60 he is humanity’s shepherd, in particular to Daphnis and Chloe, and through Chloe’ mythos, he will further beneft humanity. For most of us, eros’ highest calling is getting humans married, as are Daphnis and Chloe, which offers a type of immortality through children. Yet Eros is also connected with strife (Papadimitropoulos 19–35); the grove’s painting presents child exposure, pirates and an enemy invasion, and Eros plots the actions of the she-wolf that gets the erotic plot going, and at the novel’s end, at the Nymphs’ request, Eros must unstring his bow to allow an end to their erotic adventures. Eros works as part of an ensemble of gods, whose rector, I argue, is Dionysos. The couple’s initial protectors are the nymphs, perhaps the transfgured women of the inserted myths—Pitys, Phatta, Syrinx and Echo (Morgan, “Nymphs” 185). The Nymphs are benefcent nature and fertility spirits of the rural world, and they represent a type of innocence; accordingly, our protagonists, initially children of nature, are close to them. Experience gained, our couple begins to participate in the realm of Pan, who also represents a potential in nature (especially in Daphnis’ maleness), one aggressive, oppressive and even destructive, but also with positive characteristics.61 Pan, being musical, is also more creative, although some loss is bound up in the act of creating. Longus links Pan with Daphnis as Daphnis takes Pan’s role in his miming of the Syrinx myth, in his failed attempt at intercourse, as he tries to mount Chloe as the goats do (3.14.5), which recalls Pan’s remarks in Theocritus (Id. 1.81–88; Hunter, Study 24). At a major plot juncture, the myth of Pan and Syrinx, Lamon tells how the foundational act of pastoral music was an act of violence, a type of virgin sacrifce to hybrid maleness, violence which Daphnis and Chloe’s mime will elide. The pastoral world is also Dionysos’ realm, as refected in his myths and rituals, such as the rural Dionysia and its urban infection and, most importantly, the ornamental garden with a shrine of Dionysos at center, whose description opens the climatic Book 4. Daphnis’ father is Dionysophanes, whose decision to celebrate the Autumn’s rural Dionysia (and inspect his properties) brings him and his cohort into a greater (although artifcial) connection with the countryside, which demonstrates how urbanites can translate (or sanitize) natural culture to suit them.62 In his verbal duel with Dorcon, Daphnis declares he is beardless, like Dionysos (1.15.4); Dorcon gives Chloe a fawn skin, the costume of a maenad (1.15), which she wears for Daphnis, who mistakes her for a nymph (1.24.1); during the Dionysos harvest festival, Daphnis is compared to Dionysos (2.1); like Dionysos, Daphnis is captured by pirates; the assault of Pan on the Methymnaeans (2.26)

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 129 recalls the account of Dionysos and the pirates in the Homeric Hymn to Dionysos.63 During the celebration after Chloe’s recovery, Dryas requests Philetas strike up a Dionysic tune, during which he mimes the grape harvest (2.36); in the winter, Chloe’s parents keep the Dionysia, which Daphnis joins (3.10); Lamon cultivates a formal garden possessing an altar and shrine to Dionysos at its center, and Daphnis makes for its cult statue a crown; and the garden is watered by “Daphnis’ spring” (4.4). Gnathon is an avowed, if debauched, follower of Dionysos, a player in Dionysos’ drama; thus at Dionysos’ temple, Gnathon convinces Astylos to give Daphnis to him (4.16), initiating events leading to Daphnis’ recognition. There, too, Gnathon overhears Daphnis’ lament about Chloe, which leads to her rescue (4.29); when Daphnis dedicates items of his old life to the gods, he dedicated his bag and skin to Dionysos (4.26.2). Dionysos and his harvest rites, linked to the seasonal cycle of the birth, death and return of vegetation, furnish a metaphor for human continuity and a structuring mechanism for D & C’s plot. The country folk could see Dionysos as one of “their” gods, a theme in Aristophanes’ Acharnians and Peace. According to certain myths, Dionysos rescued his mother Semele from death, as well as Ariadne, and, in Orphic cosmology, he died and was reborn as Zagreus/Dionysos. The rites of Dionysos, as stressed in Euripides’ Bacchae, help humans recover their lost community with the natural world, as well as connect with the more sublime resources of human personality. Plato makes Dionysos the chief god of initiatory mania (Burkert, Greek Religion 292). As a god of ecstasy, he can shatter the bounds of self. Dionysos, especially as viewed through the myth of the mirror of Dionysos (Seaford 128–46), appears the god of multiplicity, through whom one can fragment into an infnite number of selves. Yet at the same time, he also preserves an unchangeable core, symbolized by his heart (Vidal-Naquet 475–78). Dionysos’ myths make him an outsider; no other god seems to be so associated with myths of rejection, invasion and even world conquest.64 Indeed, he is a mediating god of those irreconcilable and sometimes unfgurable contradictions such as motivate human events, and it is under the sign of Dionysos that the irrational, mystic, bestial and non-human can be brought into some sort of arrangement with civilization. Dionysos manifests the power of the symbolic order to incorporate the real and the sublime into it—and thus, Delphi for part of the year was turned over to Dionysos. Accordingly, to some extent all of D & C, and particularly Book 4, performs the Dionysic function of drama, to create an imagined solution to various contradictions which occur on the level of human individuals and human society, here the myth of Chloe. The ornamental garden described in Book 4 (immediately after the announcement of imminent arrival of Dionysophanes) illustrates the work of Dionysos as presiding god of that human activity which harmonizes the diverse and contradictory. Its quadripartite structure fgures D & C itself, as well as a drama’s four acts. As noted, the function of drama is to fnd meaning, if not solutions, to the crises of life, rendered into a drama’s aesthetic

130 Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe objects,65 here frst epitomized by the sufferings and triumphs of Dionysos as depicted on garden’s altar. The garden is “organized on an urban aesthetic system,” with “deliberately staged views over land and sea, reducing the natural landscape and the life of those who work in it to the status of aesthetic object . . .” (Morgan, Daphnis 224). Like Philetas’ garden, it produces fruit for every season, symbolizing how Dionysic art can accommodate all phases of life. Yet the garden’s “views over land and sea” suggest drama’s far wider perspective on the world than pastoral’s. While the earlier garden was carefully tended by Philetas, Daphnis’ father Lamon has let the garden get run down, and therefore it must spruced up before Dionysophanes arrives. That garden does not exist for the peasants’ beneft and represents a more complex and threatening world, the world of drama, that early pastoral brackets off. The violence depicted on the altar, so different from the delightful harmony of Philetas’ garden, points to the violent and tragic aspects of life that Dionysic dramatic art must make palatable. Accordingly, Chloe and even Daphnis will recognize and endure a certain violence to their persons and sensibilities as something inevitable and justifed by its social, not personal, context. The protected, enclosed garden of Philetas enjoys a fertilizing epiphany by Eros (Morgan, Daphnis 224). But like the real world, and unlike Philetas’ garden, this garden is open to erotic assault. Lampis is a musically talented cowherd, like Dorcon and Philetas, who together illustrate the potentials and limitations of the pastoral muse. When Philetas suggests that the only cure for love is sex, he both refutes the Theocritean notion that poetry can cure the ache of love and also hints that, if sex is not possible, the lover must be endlessly tormented. Thus, the only alternative to endless erotic torment is rape. The piggish Lampis’ assault upon the garden (whose pure fowers symbolize Chloe) is a manifestation of the erotic violence potential in pastoral and common in tragedy. But some of the ruined garden’s fowers still manifest beauty, as the heart of Zagreus remains after Dionysos’ body has been eaten. Lampis’ attack upon the garden also recalls the violence done to the women of the myths. Morgan believes this garden is a “silent, sterile” place, where the birds do not chirp as they do in Philetas’ garden, but note that Pan is there, playing the silent music of the imagination, where aesthetic objects are forged. This Pan is no rapist; instead, with Dionysos, he is a creator of order, producing the dance music for the male grape crushers (with the violence that implies) and female dancers. Even Pan can produce order within the Dionysiac scheme. Finally, Daphnis’ biological father is “Dionysos manifest” not in the sense that his morality makes him particularly godlike, but that he (like Daphnis) manifests the productions of Dionysos, that force that works mysteriously to bridge the contradictions of human (and especially urban) life mentioned before. Longus’ use of Plato’s conceptions of Eros, especially those of the Phaedrus and the Symposium, is frequently noted,66 mainly concerning relationships between Eros, beauty, sight, love, desire, learning, logos, mythos and the divine and transcendent. These Platonic echoes are somewhat ironic

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 131 (Bretzigheimer), suggesting that the protagonists achieve a level of philosophical development they never do.67 The novel presents varied forms of education (Herrmann 205–30), particularly educational Eros, largely seen from a Platonic perspective. The protagonists “. . . wanted something, but they didn’t know what they wanted. The one thing they knew was that he had been destroyed by a kiss and she by a bath” (1.22.4), recalling Pl. Phdr. 255e (Hunter, “Longus and Plato” 15) and the Platonic notion of not knowing love’s true aim. The protagonists’ unfocused, existential desires are not for some higher reality, nor even for sexual fulfllment, but rather for marriage and companionship and, as a foundation for these, a secure identity. The frame narrator’s longing (pothos) upon seeing the grove and its painting, to write something in response, fts perfectly with Platonic notions that traces of the divine, once recognized, can lead to further spiritual and philosophic development. It also accords with the Platonic assertion that proper philosophic souls (and indeed all souls) desire to give birth, the carnal desire to beget children, while philosophic souls desire to produce more immortal children, such as this paideutic discourse. Even Gnathon’s redemption aligns with his status as a theatēs of Daphnis’ beauty (MacQueen, Myth 170). The fact that Daphnis and Chloe see Philetas’ speech about Eros as a mythos rather than a logos recalls Plato’s Protagoras; when the philosopher offers his audience either a mythos or a logos (Pl. Prt. 320b–324d), they allow Protagoras to produce the mythos he prefers, which, as Philetas does, he follows up with a clarifying logos. The couple’s question, “What is Eros?” with the implication, “How does Eros act?” has a notably Platonic favor (Herrmann 207–09). The center of Longus’ Plato-inspired Eros-philosophy is a vision of the beautiful, particularly as found in the Symposium in Agathon’s praise of Eros (Hunter, “Ancient Readers” 91; Morgan, Daphnis 179 ff.), which is the root of all proper desire and which (because the beautiful is also the harmonious) tends to all creation. Diotima details how the experience of sheer physical beauty draws proper lovers to seek more abstract knowledge. Accordingly, as Chloe tries to fgure out where Daphnis’ beauty comes from and how to obtain it for herself, she climbs the ladder of knowledge. Daphnis and Chloe respond both emotionally and intellectually to nature’s beauty; it frst impels their desire to imitate and then kindles desire to create more original forms of beauty, a cornerstone of their education (Gillespie 429). D & C is infused with music, a Platonic fgure for the cosmic order.68 The ability to make music is a valued commodity in the pastoral world, and both Daphnis and Chloe have natural musical talents, while the urbanites are not shown making music (Montiglio, Love 132–36). Pastoral nature makes music which Daphnis and Chloe copy, and master pastoralists regulate their animals with music. When Chloe frst falls in love, she wonders if music was making Daphnis more handsome (1.13.4). There is a long tradition connecting music, its ability to control the emotions and thus the ability to control and educate individuals, and Daphnis’ musical skills point to his ability to rule.69 Philetas, expert in music and its harmonies, is therefore qualifed to

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be a judge. Yet there is a question of who gets to control music, which “integrates mythical values and roles into social reality” (Schlapbach 91; also Montiglio, Love 138) in part because some sounds (such as that of the ring dove Phatta or Echo) come with a value-laden mythic backstory in which an ideology becomes literally naturalized, and the authority which Daphnis, Lamon and others have to tell these culturally created myths to Chloe represents a form of ideological power. Vergil’s Eclogues demonstrated how music cannot overcome all problems, and abandoned or smashed pipes in D & C are a symbol for disorder (1.28.3; 2.7.6, 1.31.3 and 4.22.2). Philetas smashed his pipes when frustrated in love, and the couple smash pipes at Dorcon’s funeral; Daphnis and Chloe at times quit playing music as the onset of love’s disturbance overcame and silenced their music. But as Eryximachus noted (Pl. Symp. 187a–188a), the best music harmonizes discordant elements, such as male and female. The love that proved so disruptive to Philetas, Daphnis and Chloe was unharmonized love, in which one person’s desire cannot fnd fulfllment in a different other. These three persons are later able to play when solutions are found to bring their desires more in harmony with their objects; thus, the Nymphs promise Daphnis that he will again play the pipes with Chloe (2.23.5). But while Diotima (although a woman) gives women little participation in the beautiful, it is Chloe, not Daphnis, who frst recognizes soulennobling beauty. Daphnis and Chloe are like the philosophic couple who see in each other a vision of the beautiful and seek to learn more. Thus when Chloe sees Daphnis naked, she feels incomprehensible yearnings. Likewise Daphnis, after being kissed, fnally truly recognizes (1.17) Chloe’s beauty. This mutual recognition of beauty, connected to educational Eros, in each other impels love, but since the lovers do not know what the beloved possesses that makes them beautiful, they must seek deeper knowledge. While Daphnis and Chloe do not become Plato’s exalted philosophic lovers, they do give birth in beauty. Certainly, the way they harmonize their herds is a production of beauty; as is the music Daphnis creates, their revised Pan mime and, fnally, the image they set up is an immortal offspring which helps future generations. One class of the higher producers of beauty comprises those leaders who, because they have learned virtue in harmony with the beautiful, properly steer their societies. Daphnis and Chloe in their lived harmony with nature have gained the virtue needed to better regulate their communities. As noted, Platonic, as well as Christian, theology often posits more pandemic theology for the masses, and a truer one for the elite. All this accords with Longus’ comic vision, where less than ideal heroes (like us), yet being basically good, triumph despite themselves. History, society, ideology and the political/utopian unconsciousness Longus’ complex prologue is an instance of “pseudo-documentarianism,” even though he sets his story in a mythologized Greek past. Longus’

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 133 “history” is largely drawn from fctional sources such as Homer, Theocritus and the bucolic tradition.70 Porter connects the sublime experience with an appreciation of the broken remains of the Hellenic past, with a striving to recapture lost visages and voices (which D & C alludes to), a possible basis of renewal through a type of creative repetition. Thus consider how the novel begins with the mention of Mytilene, then of the grand estate of a rich man (Dionysophanes) and then of Lamon, making Mytilene the origin/focus of an unfolding history; the city’s relationship to the countryside in respect to the land it controls and the people it owns is a matter of history and ideology. Longus’ Dionysophanes resembles Chariton’s Dionysius, a member of his city’s high elite, an absent landlord of a vast estate who largely lives in the city, with little concern for the lives of the people he rules over and even owns. There is something of a similar blurring of slave and free status; Dionysius’ bailiff lives as a free man, and his slaves have considerable infuence over their masters, while we do not quite realize until later that Daphnis and his family are technically slaves (4.6). Where Dionysius has a shrine devoted to Aphrodite, Dionysophanes has a garden devoted to Dionysos. Both, in different ways, have been corrupted by their power and wealth, but one is nearly destroyed, the other redeemed. The paideia of Dionysius is emphasized, while Dionysophanes’ imperfect paideia and power should be judged in the context of his associates, such as his son Astylus, who enjoys a life of idle leisure, and Gnathon, who lives to drink and fornicate. Consider, too, his willingness to allow Astylus to give Daphnis to be “educated” by Gnathon and the attitude of some of the city folk to the rural inhabitants. D & C contains an increasingly pronounced city-country contrast, fguring confict between the producing class and their urban, exploiting overlords. An ideologically important episode occurs when Philetas presides over a trial between Daphnis and the rich Methymnaeans who, refusing to accept the trial’s judgment, attempt to seize Daphnis by force and are thumped by the rustics. Their falsehoods also kindle a war between Mytilene and Methymna, a confict which echoes historical reality and also comments on the foolish origin of many wars. As a prelude to the myth of Echo, the narrator mentions fshermen rowing hard to get their fsh to a rich man’s table (3.21). Note how Lamon and Daphnis must keep up an artifcial garden and stage-manage a cleaned up rural Dionysia and fear the tortures of a displeased master, whose permission is needed for Daphnis even to wed. It is summed up in the very idea of “master” which the maturing Daphnis and Chloe must come to know (4.6). The lives of the Lesbian aristocrats appear one of continuous pleasure without the burdens of work, while the rustics labor constantly. Bloch stressed the dream of a humanized nature and humanized work, and it is hard to distinguish the work of Daphnis and Chloe from play; the closeness of the protagonists to their animals and the use of music by Dorcon and Daphnis to control their animals instead of force suggest a different vision of a proper means of production.71 Pastoral presents images of both the

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anarchic and primitive utopia. In D & C’s countryside (at least until the invasion), there are no soldiers, no government offcials or major buildings, no workshops, no grand houses, and law courts are created ad hoc. There are no issues that cannot be worked out among the rustics themselves, for the forces of nature, nature’s gods and traditions known to all are what govern these less-alienated rustics. As noted, during the wedding of Daphnis and Chloe, where various worlds mingle, there is a diminution of class distinctions, and prior evildoers redeemed. Their subsequent pastoral lives, as aristocrats who defy the usual aristocratic social codes and are not cut off from the land and people who produce their wealth, continue the themes of the displaced eschatological wedding feast. It offers a semi-imaginable vision of improvement in portraying an aristocracy whose simple, natural life is more pastoral than urban, for it is connected with the rhythms of nature and its divinities, as well as with the people, animals and plants found there. And, as noted, the sense that Longus’ romantic history is created from iconic and even sublime fragments of Greek history, literature and myth, suggests that this mythos is also a logos about a historical possibility.

Longus and the career of desire D & C fgures our own need to understand love and the varied workings of desire in relation to the conficting and sometimes obscure machinations of our psychologies, subjectivities and the demands of culture and society. As a woman able to arouse a desire that will pull a man who can chose well upward, Chloe is D & C’s moral center, and Daphnis’ ethical and amatory progress will be developed largely through his treatment of her. Daphnis must more directly confront his inner Pantriarch72 and invent ways to perform his socially demanded roles as husband, aristocrat and master while reproducing to the least degree possible those forms of oppression that degrade and erase the subjectivities of others, especially Chloe’s. Desire moves them toward married, and thus adult, life, but the novel’s central issue is to what extent does the pursuit of such desires lead to betrayal, repression and even erasure. Desire rules D & C’s world. There is the sheer desire to have children and survive, as epitomized by the female wolf whose actions set the erotic drama in motion. Learning the protocols of proper human desire is tied to the couple’s eventual union, and more importantly, to the unveiling of their identity and the assumption of their proper social roles, which they adjust to provide a better model for the social forms of life. The prologue begins by foregrounding the idealized desire of the frame narrator, an eroticus who presents a model for readerly desire, and for a certain style of reading, one erotically disposed, teleological (aimed at Eros) and didactic, aimed at teaching about inescapable, omnipotent Eros. Whitmarsh considers that the chief motivator of Daphnis and Chloe is sex, but there other desires at

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 135 play (Narrative 148). As does Callirhoe, D & C presents desire as a chaosproducing device to get history moving, where those who are properly devoted to romantic love (with help from the gods) gain usable knowledge about themselves and society, whose structures can contain a form of love that is potentially harmonious, bringing more individual and social good than evil. As with other novel protagonists, Daphnis and Chloe’s great beauty is tied to virtue and social conformity, not scandal. Theocritean pastoral gives D  &  C its sense that love is a maddening disease which drives humans to various forms of predatory behavior. But in D & C’s idealized pastoral world, the utterly naïve couple naturally grow into a relationship which would not offend formative cultural values, and their love automatically acquires the ethical dimensions that moralizing systems try to impose from without. Here the hard, regular work of being a good farmer and shepherd, done in connection with a nature that educates through harmony and beauty, instills those values necessary for the proper control of desire, instead of using an urban paideia which produce akolastoi like Gnathon. Daphnis and Chloe respond emotionally and Platonically to nature’s beauty, which drives them frst to imitate nature, then to compete with it; such competition becomes a cornerstone of their education,73 for the truly human requires the augmentation of nature with culture,74 which is why their imitations of nature, especially regarding sex, are inadequate. And while there is no prospect of transcendence, their endless kisses are a metonymy for the infnitude of desire each can fnd in the other. Both Chloe and especially Daphnis experience the confused, painful and somewhat debilitating effects of love and perceive a disconnect between outward reality and powerful, fuctuating emotions. But Daphnis and Chloe (more like Theagenes and Charikleia) are hardly made passive by desire. Desire-driven, they take an active part in their education, and Chloe initially takes the amatory lead. Daphnis shows rhetorical skill in his contest with Dorcon for Chloe’s kiss, and, after Chloe helps Daphnis escape the pirates, he uses his wits to swim to shore and defends himself in the brawl after the trial and rebuffs Gnathon. Daphnis, as he matures, becomes an active force in the pastoral world, which will bring some asymmetry to their relationship. But how much and what kind? D & C is also very much about the regulation of desire and the power of the word of the father. Initially, the couple learn from images found in nature, the realm of the Lacanian Imaginary, but soon confront the realm of the Symbolic. Daphnis and Chloe must move from the world of mythos with its greater imaginative and emotional freedom, where truer human desire is expressed, and engage the world of offcial logos, the word of the father, which can alienate individuals from themselves and each other by rendering them as subjects, with more duties, but less freedom. Our near-children reproduce the fall into language as they must fnd a word (some component inside the symbolic system) to describe their feelings. When they frst go out as shepherds, they are nearly equal. But the more they are involved in

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society (which defnes what love is within the social-symbolic order), they develop varied scruples. Their lack of even knowing the name or deeds of love indicates a certain initial freedom from a realm of concepts tending to repress, not fulfll, desire. One father fgure, Philetas, who arrives with the explicit plan of educating them (2.8.1; Morgan, Daphnis 177), lays down the law in declaring that they are “in love” and how this desire must be handled, through a signifcant supporting mythos/logos. Lycaenion, another educator, lays down the law too, again though a fabricated narrative—which is effective precisely because it is augmented by real action. Dionysophanes, refecting his urban milieu, must declare rather different protocols about desire and construct, through narrative, the true history and status of Daphnis implied by the tokens, as Megacles does later for Chloe. Through these narratives the couple learn shame, how their bodies are subject to various legal aggressions and how desire must submit to economic and social necessities. Adopting convention, Daphnis and Chloe swear loyalty oaths to each other, as if mere words can dispel the reality of contingent being. Further, their confused and contradictory feelings, the inexplicable nature of their love, hint at Lacan’s erotic sublime, that condition of confusion which marks the spot where the narratives, through which we construct our fctions of the self and its activities (especially love), break down under pressure from the Real. The fact that Daphnis and Chloe cannot quite defne what drives their love points to a form of petite objet a as a source for their desire. When Chloe gets the makeover from the city ladies, Daphnis can hardly recognize her; I suggest this diffculty underscores how this dolled-up Chloe is untrue to Chloe naturans. Desire makes Daphnis and Chloe see different versions of each other, as when Daphnis notes for the frst time how beautiful Chloe is (1.17) or when Chloe imagines Daphnis as married to a city woman (4.27). And desire will provoke further acts of imagination; the novel’s last line tells us Daphnis taught Chloe some of the things Lycaenion taught him; what did he leave out? Not matters of concrete sexual technique; rather, I suggest, Lycaenion unlocked his desiring imagination which did the rest, as did his body at the critical moment earlier. As part of the comingof-age/quest archetype, the protagonists leave childhood’s security and take part in adventures which educate them in the various alternatives to the social order and its law before they attain normalized adult status. But what makes our protagonists true heroes is that they do not accept that law fully as given, but lay down their own song, as Daphnis reproduces his versions of prior myths. And through Daphnis’ ability to pronounce his own (lived and sung) law, society’s version of the law is altered.

Equality, empathy and erasure The patriarchal context of the Chloe mythos (note how Daphnis explains myths to Chloe) makes the male the teacher of his wife (as Plutarch would approve), in turn making this education an important indicator of Daphnis’

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 137 attitudes toward Chloe’s subjectivities. As their sexual symmetry breaks down due to external pressures, they lose their child-like freedom and innocent unknowing, as more traditional gender roles assert themselves. Here, it is mainly Daphnis whose innate faws must be corrected, since he is obliged to engage the wider world in ways largely closed off to Chloe. But once Daphnis gains from interactions with Chloe a proper self-understanding and control, then through his skill as a public actor he can bring Chloe-inspired benefts to the community. Winkler (Constraints 101–26) has pointed out the “hidden sorrows” of Chloe’s supposed erasure and arguably the subjugation of women and violence toward them is baked into myths of male initiation (Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity 33). Yet I see a contrast between the oppressions of the inserted myths and Chloe’s implied future,75 requiring a more nuanced view. Their love grows out of a basic good nature, friendship and community, which lays the foundation for mutual sympathy and compassion. But falling in love and the formation of their social value are woven together. The frst half of D & C contains a “Chloeomachy” establishing Chloe’s status, like the “Telemachy” establishes Telemachus’ value, before the shift to a greater concern about Daphnis, which (as in the Odyssey) ends with the reestablishment of a family and renewal of the social order. For Daphnis’ marriage to Chloe to meaningfully partake of the marriage of the goddess archetype, Chloe must be shown as valuable, and succession myths often allude to a foundational world of greater female power which becomes subordinated (but not totally) to male power. Note that it is Chloe, not Daphnis, who frst notes beauty and falls in love; she twice saves Daphnis, and Dorcon (who also drives their education) dies for her and helps Daphnis, all events confrming her importance. Her abduction and the divine interventions that return Chloe to the countryside particularly confrm her status in the divine order, as does Pan’s proclamation that Eros is composing her mythos. Further, the myth of Echo’s voice, made persistent with the help of Earth, which confounds Pan, likewise hints at Chloe’s unerasable status. The presexual Daphnis and Chloe have no clue that petting, bathing together and indulging in other forms of sex play, or full-on sexual intercourse, could be socially problematical. They are saved not just by mutual desire, but by mutual empathy, which enjoins mutual interpretation. We observe in Daphnis that sensitivity to Chloe’s feelings which Plutarch would advise, although he would disapprove of their relative equality. Chloe’s case is similar, and she, as they contemplate the arrival of a master formerly a mere word to them, worries about Daphnis, “wondering how he would be when he frst met his master” (4.6). They begin to recognize the dangers of domination, and the need to interpret and respect the other’s subjectivities. Thus, when Daphnis fnds a way to meet Chloe in the depth of winter, during their alternating conversation, he asks Chloe: “What do you want me to do then?” Chloe responds: “Remember me,” perhaps signifying: “Remember who I am, and what I am, to myself and you” (3.10.3). As they begin to live in

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more complex symbolic systems, the nature of this remembering becomes an issue, since the demands of the symbolic system do not always agree with their experience and pastoral education. The reference to Echo (3.11.1) does not mean that Chloe merely repeats Daphnis’ words, but rather their relationship recalls that “breathing together” imagined by Musonius. Chloe’s value with the pastoral world now established, a struggle begins between Daphnis’ increasing understanding of Chloe as a subjectivity and attempts to slot her into impersonal economic and social systems, which begins when serious suitors appear and Chloe’s parents press the engagement process. Earlier, the Phatta legend fgured a possible fate for a talented virgin like Chloe, musical and sexually desirable (doves being associated with Aphrodite),76 who has mastered important features of the pastoral world (she can even move her animals with music) but who is nevertheless robbed of something precious by an aggressive man (a fgure for virginity), an item so precious that her relationship to her former self is lost (Whitmarsh, Narrative 139). Subsequently, she “cannot go home again” and prays to become a bird, ever searching for her lost cattle, like a traumatized victim constantly replaying her violation (Kossaif 576). Later, Daphnis, recently recognized and still slotting himself into the social-symbolic system, is so enrapt and confused by events that Chloe believes he has forgotten her, and thus, when kidnapped by Lampis, she must be rescued by Gnathon, not Daphnis. Although Daphnis realizes his life is nothing without her, fearful of Chloe’s indeterminate social status, he still has to be forced by Dryas to tell Dionysophanes about their relationship (4.30). As noted, after the elite women give Chloe a do-over, Daphnis can hardly recognize her. This loss and non-recognition fgure a moment when Chloe no longer fts so smoothly into Daphnis’ symbolic system. In Chariton, Callirhoe was from the beginning an object, the agalma of the Syracuse, and she comes into cities, especially Babylon, as if a manifestation of a goddess. When Chloe and Daphnis arrive in Mytilene, the whole city turns out, admires their otherworldly beauty and celebrates their impending marriage, which recalls the city-celebrated nuptials of Chaereas and Callirhoe. Her public functions now have overshadowed her subjectivity. In the long drawn-out process of dedicating objects of his prior life, Daphnis contemplates his own erasure, as Chloe does shortly afterward. Note that Chloe will enjoy her frst sexual experience in union with a man she deeply loves, has chosen, who has proven himself for her, and it seems they enjoyed each other all night long. But Daphnis’ frst sexual experience comes through a manipulative seduction by a woman with no real love for him, and who will be able ever afterward to claim she, not Chloe, was his frst lover, her name “Lycaenion,” denoting her predatory nature, as “Gnathon” denotes appetite. This burden of being aristocrats explains why the couple cannot endure the city and spend most of their subsequent lives amid pastoral surroundings. The way Daphnis ensures their children are suckled by animals demonstrates his commitment to this pastoral life. The grating sounds produced by the shepherds on their wedding night imply the violence Daphnis is doing

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 139 to Chloe is sanctioned by the needs of society and the cosmic order, but Chloe’s supposed erasure should be seen in the context of her initial agency and dominance. And after Book 4, on average, Chloe should be no more “erased” than before Book 4. The novel is as much about the education of Chloe as Daphnis, and indeed, the last sentence in D & C is about the fnal step in Chloe’s education, as the last scene in Callirhoe is about Callirhoe’s understanding what has happened to her in respect to her Aphrodisian career. One wonders if Chloe’s experience of the loss of innocence and gaining of knowledge of her relation to male erotic power will be traumatic, as it was for Phatta, Syrinx and Echo. But the last lines underscore her enlightenment, as she realizes all that went before was but shepherds’ games. This is about the creation of an Odyssean “pact of old” which they renew upon that bed so directly connected with the land they rule; the rude rustics’ simulation of breaking up the soil not only connotes intercourse but a symbolic hieros gamos. Chloe is identifed repeatedly as a Nymph, and Nymphs, as fertility spirits, fulfll their telos through fertility. Chloe has found adult sexuality not traumatizing, but profoundly enlightening, concluding the educational process that began with seeing Daphnis bathing naked.

The stages of the erotic education of Daphnis and Chloe Now, with the theorizing preliminaries done, I present reading of the stages in which their education in Love and desire develops in tandem with an equally important education in society and culture. Stage one: The frst spring, setting up the initial conditions The couple, having lost their identity, have grown up in the countryside but are not fully of it (1.7.1). The parents of Daphnis and Chloe taught them both letters (1.8.1) as well as all that is kala in the countryside, but apparently not about love. Sent out into the world at Eros’ command, they manifest a natural and presexual desire to learn, to play and to form a community with each other and their animals. The couple start out in almost perfect equality, as one did the work of the other who was engrossed in play (1.10). They learn though an imitation and competition with the natural world, mimicking humanity’s primordial education.77 Longus notes: “They loved the goats and sheep more than herdsmen usually do, because she attributed her survival to a sheep, and he remembered he had been suckled by a goat when he was exposed” (1.8) and adds: “You would have been more likely to see the sheep and the goats separated from each other than Chloe and Daphnis” (1.10.3). Daphnis’ goat-nurse was later buried in the kitchen garden (4.19), and when Chloe’s true identity is recognized, Dryas shows her the ewe’s grave, which she adorns with fowers (4.32.4). The couple have forged in microcosm an ideal society bound by common occupations, interests and good will toward each other and to their subjects, as existed before easy relations between humans and a parent-like nature were sundered. Our story stresses the couple’s

140 Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe homonoia, observed as they pasture their focks together and later discuss their erotic predicament and make vows of lasting mutual support. Only after this foundational bond created by presexual attitudes has been constructed can the love-plot be set in motion. Stage two: Chloe learns of love Eros initiates the erotic plot. Daphnis falls into a pit with a goat who has had a sex-motivated battle and is pulled out with Chloe’s (improbably long) breastband, fguring how Daphnis will fall into his problematical animal nature and must be rescued out of it by Chloe with Dorcon’s help. The goat, injured when Daphnis fell on it, is given to Dorcon to be killed/sacrifced,78 dying symbolically for Daphnis’ rejected goat nature. Here, Chloe frst falls in love (a point in her favor) through the epiphany of Daphnis bathing naked at the cave79 —and their frst brush with death and permanent loss. Later, at the same cave she will show herself naked to Daphnis after he is nearly lost again. Initially, Chloe’s sexual agency is dominant;80 she consumptively gazes at Daphnis; trying to fgure out how to partake in Daphnis’ beauty, she convinces him to take another bath. Her soliloquy about love’s pains likewise implies agency, not embarrassment, as does her later demand that Daphnis swear oaths which satisfy her. Here, Chloe has deliberately chosen to seek beauty (physical and visual) and, having tested it and approved it, then love more fully arises. She wants to be another’s Lacanian desire, another’s instrument, looking forward to the myth of Syrinx. As she tries to ft the disconcerting experience of Love into the symbolic order (1.15.1), all she can think of is love as a disease (Doulamis 161). Stage three: The frst threats, and Daphnis discovers love Daphnis needs exterior motivation to discover love. The contest with the uncomprehending Daphnis which the love-struck Dorcon81 initiates to obtain Chloe’s kiss (Morgan, Daphnis 164) recalls Theocritean singing contests, especially Idyll 8, where the defeated Menalcas goes away crushed and Daphnis marries Nais. Dorcon appears a disciple of Philetas, the limitations of whose pastoral approach D & C demonstrates, the sort of person Daphnis must avoid becoming. While not yet “in love” with Chloe, Daphnis has developed a signifcant appreciation of Chloe’s beauty along with an innate understanding of Chloe’s subjectivities and the ability to use such awareness.82 Dorcon, presenting Chloe as a desirable object, unintentionally prompts Daphnis to imagine Chloe and his relationship with her anew. Thus, Daphnis calling Chloe beautiful is more than a rhetorical trope—he is doing exactly what she wants him to do, and she gives him kiss she had long desired to grant (1.17.1; Funke 187–90). Now Daphnis, once kissed, for the frst time is able to see the Form of Beauty that Chloe embodies. Note

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 141 how during the contest, when Daphnis describes important elements of his nature, proclaiming his status-value in the pastoral world as well as Chloe’s worth, his eyes are opened and he can fall in love with Chloe. Now Daphnis, too, becomes aware of Love’s paradoxes and, lovesick, he worries that Dorcon may be more handsome in her eyes—he too wants to be the object of her desire. The frst trace of human violence appears. After Chloe’s father refuses his substantial presents, Dorcon, intending to rape Chloe, disguises himself as a wolf, his passion dehumanizing himself. He barely avoids destruction, while Daphnis and Chloe think he was playing a pastoral joke. Stage four: High summer and further darker tones The summer’s blaze upon a pantheistic world is Platonically focused on beauty, and its heat mimics the couple’s painful erotic desires. Daphnis acts as Chloe’s educator, teaching her the pipes, in which she acquires some skill. While Daphnis looks consumptively at the sleeping Chloe, he complains of the billies engaged in sexual combat, wishing they had been carried away by the wolves (1.23.1–2). Daphnis marvels at and fears Chloe’s power over him, the violent impulse displaced to his wish about the wolves. Suddenly a cicada feeing a swallow fies into Chloe’s blouse. The pursuing swallow symbolizes aggression (and Daphnis’ potential), and the musical cicada is equal to Chloe (Morgan, Daphnis 171). Chloe is not passive; she puts the insect back in her dress after he has taken it out (1.26.3). Soon after, responding to Chloe’s questioning, Daphnis narrates the myth of Phatta, a “story that everybody knows” (1.27), an authoritative, persistent myth containing a culturally sanctioned warning. Longus draws explicit comparisons between Phatta and the Chloe of the previous paragraph,83 beginning: “There was a young girl, young girl . . .” (1.27). The Phatta myth suggests the threat of a dominating male (Daphnis) and the understood, often experienced, reality that an exceptional woman must suffer aggression and might face losing herself, as here a musical woman (like Chloe) loses her human identity (but retains her music) to an aggressive, more powerful boy-man (like Daphnis). It is an irreconcilable loss,84 for Phatta will still mournfully sing, always looking for her cows—anticipating the third myth, where Echo remains unreconciled to the male order. The attack of the Carian pirates and Daphnis’ capture is another transformed staple of the ideal novel, and the second major event for the “Chloeomachy.” It represents the frst incursion from the outside word which (temporarily) makes Chloe lose Daphnis (as the fall into the pit also did) and which, joined to Dorcon’s very real death, makes her understand the possibility of permanent loss in a threatening world. Daphnis’ abduction will have its counterpart in the seizure of Chloe by the Methymnaeans; both episodes recall elements of Dionysos’ abduction by pirates. Chloe arrives at the seashore carrying new pipes for Daphnis; the Phatta myth has revealed

142 Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe a possibility for confict, and her gift of a new set of pipes symbolically represents her desire to harmonize these dangerous desires. Seeing the pirates, and Daphnis lost, she drops the pipes, which symbolizes her realization that there are problems too big for mere music; this loss of music is an emblem of disorder. She seeks Dorcon’s help, but fnds him hacked up and dying. Dorcon, handing Chloe his pipes, tells her to play a tune he taught Daphnis, which Daphnis taught her, revealing Dorcon’s role as their frst educator, as Philetas later will instruct them. Instead of losing her cattle to a stronger boy, as Phatta did, the musical Chloe controls cattle to save young Daphnis. Dorcon’s dying grant of his empowering pipes, which have defeated many a pastoral foe, to Chloe parallels Philetas transferring his pipes to Daphnis to acknowledge Daphnis’ musical power, which is refected in very similar wording (Montiglio, Love 139), which, in turn, recalls Lycidas’ grant of his crook to Simichidas, confrming his musical power (Theoc. Id. 7.128—29). Chloe’s musical potential, a form of power, is now confrmed before more complex erotic, social and androcentric realms are engaged. Chloe never seems to play for any audience, implying her music has no impact, but consider this impactful performance. Finally, notice, at the book’s conclusion, how Daphnis pipes in service to Chloe’s singing voice. Her very sight revived the dying Dorcon, recalling how the equally broken Hippolytus revives at the epiphany of his beloved (and nymph-like) Artemis. Chloe’s kiss suggests Dorcon’s role as a ritual consort of Chloe, dying so that Chloe will not suffer Echo’s fate, torn apart as the musical Dorcon was hacked apart. Hippolytus was abandoned by Artemis, although honored after death. Chloe here functions like Artemis with Dorcon in the goddessand-dying-favorite scenario, but gives Dorcon a comforting fnal kiss, and receives his last breath. Like the Aphrodite of Theocritus’ Idyll 1, Chloe would have saved Dorcon, if she could have. And as Artemis commands future brides to honor Hippolytus, Chloe and Daphnis give Dorcon an elaborate pastoral grave-shine. Note how they hang up Dorcon’s pipes (while smashing others), also making offerings of fowers to the Nymphs—acts which also designate his importance to their story. Dorcon’s gravesite celebrates his status as a pastoral hero, and even his animals mourn for him, as they lamented the Theocritean Daphnis or Enkidu earlier. And her grant of the kiss to Dorcon, a kiss which she never tells Daphnis about, is paralleled by Daphnis giving Lycaenion sex, a secret kept from Chloe. Echo is never reconciled with her brutal teacher Pan, but here Chloe’s kiss to Dorcon suggests reconciliation. After their frst real encounter with death (the ultimate loss) and its pollution, as Chloe understands the real possibility of Daphnis’ loss, they go and bathe (as if to wash off death); Chloe displays herself naked to Daphnis, illustrating her desire for a greater openness to him. When they return, the animals revive; later, in Book 4, after they have returned from the city, the animals likewise gambol at their wedding, underscoring their roles as the pastoral musician-herdspersons who unite animal and human realms, a manifestation of her foundational value.

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 143 Stage fve: Autumn—more awareness of being sexually desirable Daphnis must learn more about love’s piracy, but instead, during the harvest, natural production and communal human action are intermixed under the sponsorship of Dionysos. In this space of Dionysiac fertility and freedom, they become aware of their sexual desirability, being objects of rude suggestions, and the frst notes of mutual jealousy appear. Their prayers for a quick conclusion to the harvest underscore that they are not fully of the pastoral world, with its dirtiness and sexual rudeness, and not quite ready to engage the harsher world of Eros.

Stage six: Philetas’ great revelation Book 2 further cemented Chloe’s value, but now Longus begins to detail aspects of Daphnis’ mastery of the pastoral world. Their erotic urges are becoming more urgent; “rough and tumble play” with their animals suggests displaced sexual activity, which is interrupted by the appearance of Philetas, who recalls Theocritus’ Lycidas as the archetypal, pastoral master-musician whose status is indicated by the possession of pipes recalling the “frst pipes,” by his amazing garden (where Eros himself bathes), by his history (being shepherded by Eros) and fnally, by his iconic name. Philetas’ garden, refecting pastoral poetry, is a locus amoenus of natural beauty combined with a refned human art—all tied to the rhythms of the natural and divine world (the garden has fruit for all seasons, and seems like a temple grove). All manner of musical birds grace it; it all is made lavish through divine attention,85 representing a “lovers’ landscape” which encourages imaginative absorption. Supervised by Eros, Philetas has successfully loved Amaryllis, his sons have become good herdsmen and farmers, and his youngest boy, Tityrus, gambols like a young goat. These pastorally productive sons show Eros as concerned with the maintenance of family and society, not a hostile force as in Theocritean pastoral (Morgan, Daphnis 181–83). Eros now is watching over Daphnis and Chloe, who will represent Eros’ subsequent wider experiment. As pastoral arch-poet, Philetas should be able to teach a better (albeit simpler) view of rustic Eros, which Daphnis and Chloe are ready to receive, a word of the father, defning the nature of their desire and what must be done about it. But for all the evocative beauty of Philetas’ description, the couple’s concerns are totally practical, seeking a presentation of love which connects to their experience, as does Philetas’ description of relationship with Amaryllis. Philetas does mention fgures pertinent for them: Pan and Pitys, Echo, in smashing his pipes, Syrinx and, in the mention of charmed cows, the story of Phatta. But Philetas’ philosophic exposition has little impact on the couple, and they continue to see love as a kind of disease brought on by an inescapable, baleful Eros. Philetas has little interest in moral concerns, the

144 Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe social dimensions of marriage and the sensitivities of women. It will be up to Daphnis’ more effective myth-making educator, Lycaenion, to make Daphnis engage these concerns. “Philetas taught them all this and went away” (2.8.1) looks forward to “When the lesson in lovemaking was over” (3.19.1) and to Lycaenion’s tutoring. They have learned a cultural logos which will prove ineffective, indeed being something of a loss of innocence, requiring them, after further education by subsequent events, to speak, sing and live their own logos, a ruling Word (especially Daphnis’) regarding Eros.86 Stage seven: Invasions In Callirhoe, Chaereas joins the Egyptian rebels, because he believes the Great King has taken Callirhoe from him and performs heroically. That war occurs after a trial in which the love-obsessed Great King acted unlawfully; Longus’ war also arises immediately after a trial, in which the Methymnaean youth reject the judgment rendered. War was the rite de passage in which Chaereas gained his status as future Syracusan leader. Here, in high Second Sophistic fashion, D & C’s invasion evokes the Greek historians (especially the iconic Thucydides as well as the declaimer’s view of Sophistopolis, where aristocratic pleading starts needless wars [Russell, Greek Declamation 21–39]), while further displaying the baleful power urbanites have over the countryside—all mixed with fantastic (but also iconic) material from the Homeric Hymn to Dionysos. The war’s conclusion further cements Chloe’s status, but its aftermath also reveals Daphnis as Philetas’ successor. The young aristocrats see the countryside merely as a vacation spot, like the urbanites in Book 4. In their hunting, they recall the frame narrator, as well as the activities of Astylus later. Trial scenes, another stock element, present a signifcant expression of the novel’s political unconsciousness and the ideological fantasy of class inversion.87 As the contest with Dorcon, with Chloe as his inspiration, brought out Daphnis’ hidden talents, this trial, done with Chloe present (who revives the beaten Daphnis, as she revived the hacked Dorcon), gives Daphnis a chance to display forensic skills. This episode and its aftermath acquaint the future master Daphnis with substantial matters of justice and give a foretaste of the city’s oppressions. As the disgraced youths trudge home, Chloe takes Daphnis off to the spring of the nymphs “completely at peace” (2.18.1). Does Chloe’s naïveté about the possible repercussions fgure the gap between the spirit of pastoral and political reality, as seen in Vergil’s frst Eclogue? Note that later Chloe is assimilated to her animals, also suggesting urban attitudes toward rustics (2.20).88 The invading Methymnaeans, impiously dragging Chloe from the nymphs’ shrine, are equated to invading barbarians (e.g., Persians), whose outrages provoked divine wrath; earlier, Philetas as judge swore by Pan and the Nymphs, who now will punish those who have violated the proceedings. As Daphnis makes the customary accusation of gods neglecting their

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 145 worshippers, note how he imagines Chloe living in the city, looking forward to a scene in which Chloe, thinking Daphnis has forgotten her, imagines Daphnis living in the city (4.27) and contemplates suicide, as Daphnis does now. A subsequent vision reveals to Daphnis that the Nymphs have watched over Chloe since infancy, that Eros is also watching over them now and that Pan, although previously ignored, will help.89 Daphnis’ frst engagement with Pan is as savior, not sexual predator, and he will soon honor Pan with items associated with him, the male goat and the syrinx—and also begin to deal with his own problematical Pan-nature. Chloe’s status is heightened as the feet is terrorized by supernatural wonders and a divinely sent Panic, as Chloe calmly sits wearing the pine-crown, recalling Pitys. In a dream, Pan angrily tells the commander that Eros is making a myth out of Chloe. When Chloe is returned, supernatural music leads them off the ship, the animals having formed an honor guard around Chloe. This miraculous rescue and return is the capstone of the “Chloeomachy.” Stage eight: Pan, Syrinx and Daphnis’ frst recognition But with Chloe’s value established, the focus moves to establishing Daphnis’ (problematical) status in the androcentric pastoral world. There is a victory festival honoring the Nymphs and especially Pan, who has restored order, which will be symbolized by communal feasting, conversation and especially music (Schlapbach 87; Montiglio, Love 137). Because he has now been personally benefted by Pan, Daphnis can rewrite the story of Pan and Syrinx more favorably, for which he will be granted the iconic pipes of Philetas. Daphnis begins to deal with his Pan potential in the context of wider society, whose misogynistic demands are fgured in myths which become correspondingly more violent,90 even as the couple’s actions provide an alternative. A hinge moment comes when Daphnis and Chloe mime Daphnis’ retelling of the Syrinx myth, which represents them as a couple who must engage the protocols of male dominant culture (Funke 194). At the celebration, Philetas arrives with his son Tityrus, carrying a cluster of grapes, a Dionysiac offering. The scene of the old men, drinking and telling of their exploits, offers a ftting prelude to the next step in Daphnis’ initiation. Accordingly, Lamon tells the origin of the Syrinx, emblematic of pastoral culture,91 a story of unequal love, attempted rape and a woman’s loss of identity to become an instrument which symbolizes unequal love. Thus, a foundational act of the pastoral world was the dismemberment of a woman whose “voice” is now controlled by any man who plays her. Even Echo is taught to play the syrinx (3.23). They fnally ask Philetas to play a Dionysiac tune, appropriate for a dramatic transition. Dionysos is the god of theater, and, in the Dionysiac mode, Daphnis and Chloe dance out the tale of Syrinx. Daphnis signifcantly alters Lamon’s story.92 Daphnis plays a tune, which mimics wooing, a tune of recall, of seeking and not fnding—there is no violent chase, a better erotic alternative in line with Chloe’s imagined sensitivities.

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Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe

That Daphnis takes the role of Pan symbolizes his identifcation with his Pan potential, as does the masterly way he moves his audience though the power of music’s mimetic illusion; Daphnis offers both a virtual epiphany of Pan and of his new self in the real world, as drama brings the illo tempore of mythical time into the Hellenic present. Immediately, Philetas gives his iconic pipes to Daphnis—a moment of initiation and of status change.93 Daphnis has played the part of the musical Dionysiac artist who can tell an old story in a new, better way. Note this was not pre-planned; Daphnis just jumped up to play. The performance only works well because Daphnis and Chloe work together, a creative response to each other, with real input from Chloe.94 The story of Syrinx makes both aware of greater amatory complexities; is not the Syrinx story the nightmare version of Chloe’s prior fantasy to be Daphnis’ pipe so she could be “played on by him” (1.14), which comes true, after a fashion?95 As noted, one major component of love is the desire to be the desire of the desired one. Correspondingly, it is not a disgusting, fearful thing to be the object of desire by one hated by you (e.g., Pan)? Observe how, after their Syrinx-mime, Daphnis kissed her “as if they had been reunited after a real fght”—which suggests the fear that she might actually want to fee from him. To deal with these implications and anxieties, they have a fdelity contest and end up swearing oaths of loyalty that they would never live without the other, a new level of commitment. Although Chloe has sworn by the nymphs, now Daphnis swears by Pan, signaling a new self-conception. Note that Chloe feels free to reject his oath, for she knows of Pan’s problematical loyalty. Instead, she wants him to swear by the goats and sheep, which Chloe, according to the narrator, thought were the special gods of shepherds and goatherds, a sign of her simplicity (Morgan, Daphnis 199). I think a better explanation is that, as mentioned earlier, they and their animals form a community of trust and concern. A sheep and a goat saved them, and now, they loyally tend them. Here, Daphnis must swear by the most concrete manifestation of loyalty they know. With the exchange of oaths, they come to a double impasse, for marriage is a social and economic reality yet unconfronted and, erotically, they have gone as far as possible without real sexual knowledge, issues engaged in the third book. Stage nine: A winter of longing and invention Having sworn they would die if separated, now winter now separates them.96 The winter time of trial is preparatory for the Spring’s transformations— note Chloe’s mother is teaching her the skills of a potential wife. The birds Daphnis pursues symbolize his real hunting objectives, and bird and their hunting place have erotic overtones (Morgan, Daphnis 202–03). His resourcefulness impresses his future father-in-law. Signifcantly, they are celebrating the Dionysos festival around the winter solstice. Dionysos presides over the birth of the year and the ensuing transformations—who else might

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 147 be the stage manager of the comic chase that brought Lampas outside to meet Daphnis? Chloe is totally satisfed simply with Daphnis’ company, but Daphnis, as his nocturnal interlude with Lampis shows, wants more. As noted, Daphnis’ question, “What do you want me to become?” and her response, “Remember me” fgures how, as they navigate more complex symbolic systems, the nature of this mutual remembering becomes an issue. Notice that Chloe responds to Daphnis’ comments like an echo (3.11.1), but hardly repeats what Daphnis says. Daphnis is increasingly the initiator, but not a dominating one. Stage ten: New spring, more sexual excitement, more learning When spring comes, Daphnis and Chloe rush out to their shepherding duties, careful frst to honor the gods. Their competition with the nightingales suggests active human creativity, but the reference to Itys’ lament recalls tragic potential, for Philomela was another woman brutalized and silenced by male lust, but who found a way to speak and even obtained some revenge, helped by another feminine fgure—as Echo will be helped by Earth. It also suggests how tragedy gains compensation in music, since the nightingale makes the most beautiful music (Morgan, Daphnis 206–07). The new spring has a greater focus on sex than before, and the aroused Daphnis persuades Chloe to let him try what the animals are doing. Their attempt fails in frustration, for human sexual praxis is not merely a duplicate of animal copulation.97 They are observed by the too-elegant-for-the-Country woman Lycaenion (“Miss Little Wolf”), thought to be the legal concubine of the older, wealthy, Chromis. She, unsatisfed with Chromis, recalls Dorcon, a sexual predator, and seeks Daphnis for her pleasure, is similar to the dangerous, tempting women encountered by other romantic protagonists. Her name also aligns her with the hetairai of New Comedy, foreshadowing developments in Book 4.98 But Daphnis’ nobility and evident love for Chloe awaken her more noble side and in good Platonic fashion (Morgan, Daphnis 206–07), Lycaenion falls in love with Daphnis due to his beauty and teaches Daphnis (and thus Chloe indirectly) though action what Philetas failed to. Chloe’s planned kiss triggered Daphnis’ explicit fall into love by opening his eyes to beauty, while Lycaenion’s planned seduction of Daphnis breaks their educational impasse and gives him knowledge of the physical telos of love. Her statement about being sent by the Nymphs has more truth than she knows, and Daphnis’ reaction, as if this information was heaven-sent, suggests the frame narrator’s Eros-vision. Lycaenion teaches Daphnis the human technē that must supplement the couple’s imitation of animals. Unlike Philetas’ advice, Lycaenion’s tutelage has an empathetic dimension, for she shows him (in exaggerated terms, which may refect her own initiation into sex as a marginalized woman) the potential negatives of human sexuality and thus reveals the moral dimension of his choice—his own pleasure vs. Chloe’s possible pain. Daphnis imagines Chloe wounded, as if

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murdered—which echoes the destruction of the women in the myths. Having no idea that premarital sex could be wrong for social reasons, Daphnis still cannot see how it could be right to force this on Chloe merely to gain personal pleasure. Lycaenion only needs initiate sex, and nature teaches Daphnis the rest. But it is this moral dimension, along with a consideration of another’s subjectivity, which separates us from animals and animal instinct (Morgan, Daphnis 210). Lycaenion and Chromis will appear at the couple’s wedding, suggesting her encounter with them helped her relationship. Daphnis does not tell Chloe about this transformative event. Perhaps, refecting Daphnis’ new perspective, Chloe appears at her most doting, dependent, naïve (knows nothing about echoes!) and girlish, taking food from his mouth like a baby bird, a huge contrast with the experienced Lycaenion (Morgan, Daphnis 213). Note how the fshermen rowing hard to get their catch to a rich man’s table allude to power structures that subject one set of persons to another even in terms of diet. Daphnis realizes his structural power over the vulnerable Chloe, but his power to positively transmute (as he transmuted the Pan-Syrinx story) is displayed again as he tries to memorize the sailor’s chants. He knows Chloe’s potentially independent spirit, and his guilty fantasy-fear is of a fundamental disjunction between them. After all, if such a disjunction did not exist, why would the frst act of love be like an act violence done to an enemy? The musical Phatta loses her body, but her voice remains, mourning her lost cattle; Syrinx becomes a pipe which must play Pan’s tune. Daphnis’ myth of Echo, presented at frst like an encyclopedic entry, is a nightmare myth for putative patriarchs, telling of a society of savage men lacking self-control, who, resenting musical, talented women (like Chloe, whom Echo clearly echoes) who can reject them, dismember her. But, as symbolized by the feminine Earth who receives her singing limbs, the female powers cannot be fully erased. The dismemberment of the musical Echo evokes the sparagmos of Orpheus, whose head made music while foating to Lesbos (Schlapbach 86), implying the triumph of music over destruction (Hunter, Study 54; Morgan, Daphnis 215). The fact that Pan runs all over looking for his pupil is, in Lacanian terms, a fruitless attempt to ft woman into the male symbolic order, so to speak, to “make her his pupil.” Phatta remained unconsoled to losing her cattle, and the relationship of Pan and Syrinx, forced to play Pan’s music, must always be unequal. All the previous myths showed male aggression and female resistance and loss, but here we observe more effective female resistance through female cooperation. After Daphnis has told his story, Chloe gives Daphnis nearly endless kisses, for Echo had repeated everything he said, as if asserting Daphnis’ mythos (3.23) and its implied lesson were true; in a sense, Echo has told her own story.99 Stage eleven: The second summer—dangerous heat Although they continue erotic play, Daphnis fears the failure of his logismon, a token of Daphnis’ new maturity, but also a departure from the

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 149 natural world of instinct and equality, for Chloe is too modest to ask why he avoids seeing her naked (3.24). They now live in somewhat different realities, colored by fear and shame. Daphnis acts, and Chloe feels compelled not to question, a disconnect that can only be dissolved by a deeper societysanctioned union. Stage twelve: The threat of suitors and Daphnis’ engagement The male maturing protagonist must learn about the cultural, social and political structures he is embedded in, here particularly about demands of status and money. Chloe (who tries at frst to shield Daphnis from the truth) and then Daphnis learn of “marriage” as a socio-economic construction apart from love. Lamon is particularly harsh in “laying down the law,” and thus, Daphnis sounds out Myrtale, who offers little hope. The hapless Daphnis again seeks the Nymphs’ aid, and they offer help, although the actual marriage is the responsibility of another god (Eros). Note how Daphnis approaches the shore (normally a fearful place for goatherds) with religious awe; that life-saving riches are protected by a hideous odor likewise suggests mystery (Morgan, Daphnis 219). Daphnis’ declaration of how he has expanded the fock casts him as a kind of divine herdsman (think of the biblical Jacob), but also recalls the clueless boast of the Cyclops in Theocritus’ Id. 11.34–41. The fertility Daphnis has engendered contrasts with the season’s poor agricultural output ( 3.30). The full negotiation of the Dryas and Lamon is an elaborate, and quite unideal, ritual of superfcial politeness and hard economic strategizing, a dramatic contrast with the relative naïveté of Daphnis. Lamon’s parting shot hints at Daphnis’ higher status and also recalls the overriding mythical structure and its demand for the revelation of the social status and true identity of the marvelous children that will determine the happy ending. Daphnis thinks Lamon’s proclamation of him as “son-in-law” has secured his status defnition, and he immediately engages in activities symbolic of his future husbandhood. He moves “quicker than thought,” suggesting a godlike power in this transformation, although his duties are quite prosaic (3.33). The register then shifts to a complex dialectic of myth. The missed apple alludes to Sappho’s famous epithalamium (LP 105a), anticipating their coming marriage. Daphnis’ aggressive pursuit of the apple is a metaphor for the taking of the bride’s virginity, a substitution for what Daphnis will not do immediately (Morgan, Daphnis 221). Signifcantly, Daphnis puts the apple in the context of the operation of the seasons, as well as of divine Fortune, and evokes the frame narrator’s “as long as eyes can see” trope with its Platonic overtones. This fruit then morphs into the apple that Paris gave to Aphrodite to designate her as the most beautiful goddess. That prior grant of an apple led to a marriage being destroyed, countless Greeks and Trojans being killed, Troy being burnt and much of Greece politically ruined. This apple will lead to a better result in the evocation of the archetype of the quasi-divine shepherd wooing and winning an earth goddess to the greater

150 Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe beneft of all. Daphnis has seemingly defed Chloe in his lies, illicit sex and his aggressive action, but here he confesses her ultimate rule over him, being that avatar of the beautiful he must submit to, and be judged by, the prize now being her kiss, recalling the kiss she gave long ago when she chose him in the contest with Dorcon. Stage thirteen: Preparation for the arrival of the city party Autumn is the season of harvest, mystery rites and revelations, as well as of the dramatic doings of Dionysos. Lamon must quickly tidy up the estate so that the city folk are not offended, setting up parameters for the coming confict. The customs of the city folk are antithetical to the true nature of the countryside, and yet they have the power over Daphnis, Chloe, their family and friends. The invasions of the city folk parallel those of the Methymnaeans. One solution to this threatening divide is fgured by the ornamental park, which symbolizes the role of Dionysos as well of the art of drama, which resolves profound confict. Therefore the announcement of Dionysophanes’ (“Dionysos’ Workings Manifest”) immanent arrival, bringing with him potential tragedy, is followed by the park’s detailed description. As noted, in contrast to Philetas’ garden, this park refects a superior urban aesthetic that combines varied worlds, containing all seasonal vegetation and looking over the human and natural world, rendering them into aesthetic objects. The shrine’s Dionysos images display his struggles and triumphs in the context of the world’s violence, including mystery—and Pan, too, not as rapist, but, as noted, as a producer of order and the music of the imagination. Yet the more abstracting and wider purview of the Dionysiac spirit is alien to that of the pastoral countryside—it exists for the master, not for the owned. Daphnis works overtime, with Chloe’s self-sacrifcing help, to make his goats look well cared for. We observe Chloe’s empathy, as she imagines how Daphnis feels to see his master for the frst time (4.6). Their desire at that moment to be fused together, recalling Aristophanes’ myth, arises as their real vulnerability to permanent separation sinks in. The reference to the goats as “Pan’s fock,” like the earlier depiction of Pan playing dance music, shows another, positive role of Pan as good shepherd and also hints at Daphnis’s Pan-nature. A second danger soon follows. As Chariton’s Callirhoe had many suitors, who took vengeance against the couple when rebuffed, so Lampis (like Dorcon, a musical pastoralist and would-be rapist) wrecks the ornamental garden. The sufferings of Dionysos are drama’s foundational story, and thus, the abuse of Dionysos’ garden by Lampis is another persecution of the god, as well as a reproduction of the violence done to the women of the myths (Morgan, Daphnis 227). Lamon’s worries over the ruined garden, vividly imagined, give Daphnis and Chloe more insight into the power relations between slaves and masters.100

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 151 Astylus (“City Boy”) arrives early and suggests what Daphnis might have become. He recalls the young men of Methymna, who live without care and come to the countryside to holiday and hunt. Note that, although not much older than Daphnis, Astylus has enough sexual experience to be sympathetic to Gnathon’s yearnings, although it is doubtful he has any idea of love as something that respects another person’s subjectivities. Gnathon (a parasite, another stock New Comic character) embodies how urban paideia, although containing insights into Eros, has corrupted it in practice; he is a creature of appetites, an akolastos, who uses erotic logos tactically, not morally.101 Astylus telling arrives with Gnathon behind him on the same horse.102 I agree with Morgan that Longus frames the aggressive sexuality of Lycaenion and Gnathon as unreproductive pathologies of the city. Gnathon’s quasi-comic rape attempt teaches Daphnis about urban Eros and its perversion of Desire, making Daphnis think about issues of culture versus nature. Just as Daphnis revealed unknown forensic rhetorical abilities in the trial, so here he demonstrates the sort of philosophic argument seen in urban circles. That, after pushing him down, Daphnis runs away “like a puppy” suggests Daphnis’ relative vulnerability (Jones, Playing 214–18), while the remark, “needing a man, not a boy, to give him a helping hand” (4.12.3) recalls how Daphnis once fell and needed a helping hand to get up, aid Gnathon will receive indirectly. Like Dionysius in Callirhoe, Dionysophanes is an exemplary aristocrat who travels with an entourage and has good (if customary) habits in honoring the gods and creating community, as epitomized by setting up communal wine bowl, evoking Dionysos. And, like Dionysius, his integrity is compromised. If we consider Chloe as a nymph embodying the countryside, this inundation of city life could seem too much for her, explaining her fight into the woods.103 There is a quasi-epiphany of Daphnis as the embodiment of the pastoral world, but for the entertainment (and instruction) of the city party (4.14). Earlier, a worried Chloe imagined him as Marsyas being skinned alive by Apollo, but now he is manifested as Apollo the supreme Good Shepherd, familiar from Greek art. Not only did Daphnis increase and beautify herds, but he also harmonized them—they show no injuries due to sexual battles. He has inherited and improved upon the legacy of Philetas, providing an image of a utopian world of work, where carefully tending animals are moved by music, more obedient than even human servants. And, foreshadowing his future urban status, he has them sit as “in a theater” (4.15); consider the use of the theater as an aristocratic political space in the novels (Montiglio, Love 150). Dionysophanes has mentioned granting his slaves freedom, and, after the exhibition, Daphnis and Chloe eat for the frst time city food, beginning the urban component of their lives. Soon after Gnathon makes his appeal to Astylos at Dionysos’ temple, underscoring the god’s involvement. Gnathon’s speech parallels that of Philetas, and he makes valid points about how love transcends boundaries of

152 Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe class and even species,104 telling more truth than he knows, for the speech is composed of sophistic commonplaces. This is why Astylus smiles (as a Kleitophon would)—not at his truths, but at his sophistry. The three prior myths told of women subject to men’s desire, their subjectivities overridden, a situation now Daphnis faces. Consider how shockingly easily Dionysophanes, who has just admired Lamon’s work and promised him his freedom, agrees that Daphnis be given to Gnathon. Neither Dionysophanes nor Astylus grant slaves a subjectivity which must be respected, and they think that any life in the city would be better than rural life. Tellingly, Dionysophanes tells the protesting Lamon not to tell any “myth-like tales”—in fact, Daphnis’ story does correspond to a myth. Lamon produces his own logos, but, because he is a slave, his story must be backed up with more concrete signs, such as a willingness to be tortured and the birth tokens. Inspecting the tokens, the stunned Dionysophanes counters with a new logos which radically rewrites Daphnis’ self-history, a Word of the Father which defnes Daphnis’ status and what economy of desire he fts into. These tokens mean nothing without Dionysophanes’ affrming logos to put them in context, an issue which will become obvious later as Heliodorus’ Hydaspes debates the validity of Charikleia’s recognition tokens. Dionysophanes’ explanation for Daphnis’ abandonment, given without evident guilt, undermines our impression of Dionysophanes (Morgan, Daphnis 240). Unlike Megacles, Dionysophanes intended that the exposed child die, and his excuse about being too poor to raise another child sounds hollow when we recall that Lamon can afford it. Book 4 has become New Comedy, which often feature an anagnōrisis as well as a signifcant metabasis. Daphnis treats his real parents as if he had known them all his life because nature (physis) caused them to bond, which aligns with physis setting up the fnal component of Daphnis’ sexual education. Daphnis, recognized, is suddenly surrounded by a devoted (although hierarchically arranged) crowd, puts on city clothes and even forgets Chloe for a moment. Here, Daphnis sees himself defned as part a symbolic system in which one’s biological parents are thought essential to his identity and thus future. Daphnis, suddenly disoriented by an image of supposed wholeness, does not understand full shape of his identity, and thus, after hearing Dionysophanes tell him how he will inherit this farm, Daphnis comically recalls his thirsty goats, whom he feels obliged to tend (4.25). Daphnis now seems to forget Chloe because his story about life with her has not been grafted into his new life narrative, especially regarding the diffculties of their now apparently radically different statuses. In Lacanian terms, his discovery of his new identity is a type of new start—that is, he suddenly is pronounced to be this fantasy of wholeness, which must be intoxicating and disorienting at frst. He, with real grief, bids goodbye to signifcant items of his prior life, including his goats. As noted before, accepting a new logos can require the erasure of the old logos, and the items he dedicates and erases are, so to speak, phrases in that logos. Note he will take up the pastoral life

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 153 later, and therefore, this grief suggests that part of him recognizes that he is giving up items constitutive of his identity. And Chloe is not exactly forgotten; note how he “drank from the spring too, because he had often done so with Chloe” (4.26), fguring how Daphnis’ and Chloe’s relationship is bound to nature, symbolized by the spring’s living water. Yet Daphnis says nothing of his love to his new parents, as he was “waiting for the right opportunity” (4.26). Stage fourteen: Daphnis forgets Chloe and learns of the limits of his new identity; Chloe’s birth secret revealed The extant ancient novels display many episodes wherein one lover forgets or betrays the other. In one version, the classical Daphnis betrayed his nymph. Chloe, who has before worried about Daphnis’ potentially deceitful Pan-nature and now reads him as part of a city narrative with new love interests, now feels abandoned and makes the usual threat of suicide (4.27). This apparent faithlessness is followed immediately by Chloe’s abduction by Lampis and his henchmen. The explanation for why Daphnis does not try to rescue Chloe almost certainly rests in the complications of his new identity, summed up in the phrase: “He didn’t dare to speak to his father [Dionysophanes]” (4.28). The rigid rules of the urban elite forbid relationships with shepherdesses or direct involvement in the wrangles of the lower orders. Thus, he can say: “How much happier I was when I was a slave. Then I looked at Chloe . . .” (4.28). Luckily, one of the utopian themes of comedy is how the goodness of the principles can redeem otherwise reprobate characters, such as Gnathon who now plays the hero and rescues Chloe. What young Daphnis has seen of elite attitudes has understandably made an impression on him. If Dionysophanes was willing to kill his own infant (him!) as the price of maintaining elite status, he could well imagine Chloe’s lack of elite status might cause Dionysophanes to put her out of the way. Thus even after Chloe is rescued, Daphnis hesitates to reveal their love; indeed, although Chloe may be willing, Daphnis wishes to put Chloe into the same relationship to him as he would have been to Gnathon in the city (Morgan, Daphnis 243). Thus, Dryas objects (although with less deference to Dionysophanes) on similar grounds as did Lamon, although he retains hope of extensive gain. Dionysophanes is worried about his son, but satisfed with the proofs of Chloe’s upper class background (only after questioning) and Daphnis’ affrmation of her virginity, whose value Daphnis by now understands. And, perhaps showing the potentials of a better nature, Dionysophanes compassionately reassures Chloe. Stage ffteen: Chloe’s identity begins to be revised Having had an anagnōrisis and metabasis, Chloe enters into a new culturalsymbolic system, the outward manifestation being the makeover Chloe

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receives. Urban technē can improve upon raw nature, showing Daphnis previously unimagined potentials in Chloe. But here Chloe is being transformed from a subjectivity to a symbolic icon, to serve as a token in the cultural and political order rather like those of Chariton’s Callirhoe or Xenophon’s Anthia (Gillespie). Callirhoe was subject to a beauty contest when she entered Babylon, and the women of Mytilene hope their beauty is great enough for them to be suspected of being Chloe’s mother. The fact that Daphnis cannot recognize her after the makeover points to a clash between the urban symbolic system Chloe now has been slotted into and the inner essence Daphnis knows. Like Daphnis, she will dedicate and erase elements of her old life and narrative with whom she had a strong connection. As Daphnis drank from the spring in memory of Chloe, so Chloe pours wine into the spring where she had bathed, near where she had been found, and, as Daphnis spoke to his billies, Chloe lays fowers on the grave of the ewe who saved her. Stage sixteen: The discovery of Chloe’s origins as Eros unstrings his bow As the parents had gotten a dream/command from Eros to send their children out to herd animals, Dionysophanes gets a dream from Eros (whom he recognizes) to arrange the folktale-infected banquet. In his dream, Eros unstrings his bow and lays aside his quiver.105 Eros has been the wild, natural goad of desire, which has smashed Daphnis and Chloe together. Now, because of their learning and experiences, the carnal goadings of Eros can be replaced by the bonds of matrimony, a human institution. Note here Chloe’s recognition, because it is tied her marriage with Daphnis, occurs at a banquet with imperial overtones, with symbolic food coming from every land and sea, and all the aristocrats invited as witnesses.106 When Megacles sees the tokens, he is rejuvenated, shouting with the force of a young man. His backstory shows him the more compassionate moral superior of Dionysophanes, which agrees with Chloe’s superior virtue and greater connection with the divine. Megacles, having impoverished himself through donations to the public good, wanting Chloe to survive, had handed her over to the nymphs, who sent revelations to him. Dionysophanes then publicly sums up the miracle-plot of abandonment, survival, discovery and impending marriage. Stage seventeen: Their rustic marriage and life after marriage Finding the city unbearable, they return to the country; they are coming to realize that their city origin and city mores need not defne who they actually are. As described above, their wedding mingles varied worlds in an eschatological moment. Daphnis calls the billies by name and kisses them. Not only do the principles and their aristocratic and rustic friends and relatives show up, but also Lycaenion and her husband, whose union may have

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 155 been revitalized by the example of Daphnis and Chloe. The would-be rapist Lampis plays, along with Philetas, at their wedding. They will continue live a continuation of the pastoral life with some urban elements seen during the wedding. The city vs. country contrast has been resolved mostly in favor of the country. They will spend some time in the city, but compare that time to the life of Dionysophanes, who has gone several years (at least) without coming to the countryside. Food defnes lifestyle; note that the simple milk and fruit of the countryside remained their favorite food (4.39). Longus’ fantasy solution to the harmful separation of city and country is found in a synthesis of urban and country, the latter being still grounded in pastoral values as humanity’s foundational values, and then augmented by what city values are useful to uncover the countryside’s potentials. Eros’ solution is Daphnis and Chloe, who stay close to the pastoral deities, who are fundamental for the world’s cycles and who will at the same time not be remote and insensitive masters of the rural world, but will be its organic leaders. Daphnis may no longer have to shovel manure, but he will not sneer at the smell. He will not treat his human property like fungible objects. Considering Chloe’s supposedly “erased” future, realize Daphnis and his nymph-like Chloe will spend their subsequent lives mostly amid pastoral surroundings, close to nature’s nurturing forces (Pan and the Nymphs), less obliged to conform to soul-warping urban sexual hierarchies. Chloe will retain her considerable music among pastoral’s nature, gods and communities, not leading the restricted life of a Cleariste, remaining essential to Daphnis’ own being, connected to the rustic world’s sacred harmonies and social realities. I have suggested that the myth of Echo indicates the way Chloe will remain unerased. While Chloe may lack Daphnis’ artistic skill, she retains that primal female musical power and can imitate creatively and willfully. Thus, Chloe will occupy social slots where she must be (or seem to be) imitator, not initiator, but she can be a pupil that can exceed the control of the master, and will be able to imitate even the gods. Note that Plutarch says that a wife must acknowledge that “she makes a more imposing sound through a tongue not her own” (Conjug. 32), but, in the end, it is her making the sound. This is quite different from a situation in which a wife can offer no opinions of her own. Chloe interprets Daphnis, but Daphnis invents himself and interprets himself through Chloe. She raises him up, and what mitigates the quasi-erasure of Chloe is that Daphnis knows he is who he is through her. The grating sounds of the shepherds during the wedding night reproduce the patriarchal notion that women must be tamed and used, but the couple’s actions reveal more than this. As noted, Daphnis teaches Chloe some things that Lycaenion taught him, not new sexual techniques, but rather, I suggest, the erotic imagination which takes into account Chloe’s sensitivities and desire. Daphnis subsequently sets up the shrine and painting, presumably the one the frame narrator encounters, which becomes one of those iconic, evocative and sublime fragments a Pausanias or Longus will seek out and cultivate as a possible source of inspiration for the present.

156 Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe

The nature of the utopian and the possibility for the ideal For many readers, D & C’s almost fairy-tale atmosphere negates any serious utopian considerations. Building upon its parent, pastoral, it is the richest in its moving evocations of ideal themes curated from myth, philosophy and religion. The ideal relationship between the nymph-like Chloe and Daphnis the pastoral genius-hero mirrors that between farmer and Earth; the farmer works and subjugates the earth while understanding and respecting the fundamental priority, power and truth of Earth. One sees here the dream of living closer to nature in the rural Dionysia which Dionysophanes, like many aristocrats of Longus’ time, participated in, a dream still alive in today’s gig economy often populated with BS jobs (Graeber). This connects to D & C’s paradisical, pastoral and eschatological images of a world where there a considerable mingling among the divine, the human, animals, nature, slaves, rustics, aristocrats and divinities. In this unifed realm, informed by the spirit of music, unalienated work begins to resemble play. A secular version of this dream appears in the demonstration of how nature and human life need art to bring out their potentials. Longus’ idealized vision does not alter fundamental hierarchies. But D & C shows how the couple, working together, in connection with each other’s subjectivities and innate diffculties, craft solutions to the knotty problems of creating and living an improved set of behaviors for their communal life, one which they pass on to the future and the wider world though their children, the painting and its popular shrine. For me, the chief vector of the utopian in D & C lies in the beauty and (for me) the power of Longus’ sophisticated literary expression of that enduring dream of a better world, which, like Eros, we must never forget, and so be more strongly motivated to achieve it and make it News from Somewhere.

Notes 1 I use the Greek text of Daphnis and Chloe in Edmonds and Gaslee, but the translation of Gill. 2 See Reardon, “Μῦθος” 135, citing Barber; also Schönberger. 3 The pastoral of Philetas and Theocritus was partially a reaction to the rise of mass cultures in Hellenistic cities. Longus’ novel may be a response to a tale reported in Plutarch (On the Obsolescence of Oracles XVII) that the passengers of a passing ship heard the cry “Great Pan is dead,” symbolizing the end of the pagan Greek world; see McCulloh 13–15. 4 Anderson, Ancient Fiction 43–61; Hunter, Study 59–83; Zeitlin, “Gardens” 153–57. 5 Effe, “Longus” 192–93. The name in the manuscripts usually involves poimenika. 6 On this aspect of pastoral, see Segal, Poetry 12. 7 For more on manuscripts, date and the identity of Longus himself, see Hunter, “Longus, Daphnis” 367–70; Morgan, Daphnis 1–2. 8 Bowie, “Greek Novel”; Mason, “Romance.” 9 On D & C and the Second Sophistic and the practice of paideia, see MacQueen, Myth 175–85; Anderson, Second Sophistic 168–70 and 195–96; Zeitlin, “Poetics.”

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 157 10 Probably quite close in time; for a further comparison of these texts, see Alvares, “Reading”; Zeitlin, “Longus” 405–19. 11 See PSI 1220 and commentary in Stephens and Winkler 429–37; also Morgan, Daphnis 7. 12 Anderson, Eros 41–42; Morgan, Daphnis 4. On now these common elements undergo a bucolic transformation, see Effe, “Longus” 191–93. 13 Note in the very fragmentary Phoinikika of Lollianus, apparently Androtimus has his frst experience of sex, and is then rewarded, by an older woman; Stephens, “Fragments” 670. 14 For a comparison of these two prologues, see Morgan, “Prologues”; also Alvares, “Reading.” 15 For Morgan, the frame narrator is not the novel’s “controlling intellect,” nor is his interpretation necessarily authoritative (Daphnis 17–18); see also Winkler, Constraints 106–07. For more on the author’s text vs. the narrator’s text, see Morgan, “Nymphs” 171–89. 16 For example, the narrator does not perceive the connection between the painting he sees and the dedication Daphnis and Chloe set up, nor understands the seriousness of Daphnis and Chloe’s sex play, and fails to appreciate Lycaenion’s real role; Morgan, “Nymphs” 182–89. 17 On realism in D & C, see Arnott 199–215; also Scarcella, “Realtà.” 18 On the prologue, see Hunter, Study 83 ff.; McCulloh 32 ff., MacQueen, Myth 15 ff.; Morgan, Daphnis 145–50; Pandiri 116 ff.; Teske. 19 For me, the two most likely interpretations of eikonos graphēn are “a drawing/ painting belonging to a dedication” or “the drawing/painting of a “mental’ image,” which could mean story or even vision; see Bowie, “Caging.” 20 On the account as sacred tale, see Zeitlin, “Poetics” 422. 21 See Pandiri 118. On this grove as an entry into the space of Plato’s work, see Hunter, “Longus and Plato” 23–27. The painting’s ability to elicit pothos denotes its quality; see Gillespie 426. 22 For discussion, see Morgan, “Daphnis”; Cusset. 23 On the sweetness of Longus’ style, see Hunter, Study 84–98; on his musicality, see Zeitlin, “Poetics” 453; Chalk 37. 24 For more discussion of this recollection of Thucydides, see Valley 102; Hunter, Study 47–50; Pandiri 117–19 and n. 9; Luginbill 233–47; Bowie, “Caging.” 25 D & C allows a “smutty” reading; see Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity 13–14; Rhode 549; Wolff 130. 26 Zeitlin, “Gardens” 156; Park 259. It may also recall the Chorus’ prayer to Eros for moderation in Eur. Hipp. 525–32; see Morgan, Daphnis 150. 27 For discussion, see Hunter, “Longus and Plato” 25–27; also Connor 155–89. 28 As in New Comedy, they are the children of aristocrats; they are in but not of the pastoral world, set apart by their beauty (Longus 1.7.1). 29 On the importance of Lycaenion, see Levin; Epstein, “Longus’ Werewolves”; Wouters. 30 For further discussion, see Heiserman, Novel 143; Zeitlin, “Poetics” 422. 31 See Hunter, “Longus, Daphnis” 377–82; Winkler, Constraints 101–26. 32 “While they were playing these games, Love contrived to make things serious” (1.11), setting the future love plot in motion. 33 The fact that Philetas’ son has the pastoral name Tityrus and resembles both goats and Eros (Morgan, Daphnis 195) suggests that Philetas’ tradition too will continue. 34 Anderson stresses the ineptness of the rustics and the couple and sees D & C as essentially a comedy in the modern sense (Eros 41–49). 35 Reardon, “Mῦθος” 135–47; also Pandiri 116 and n. 3.

158 Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 36 On Longus, Theocritus and pastoral in general, see Alpers esp. 323–48; Effe, “Longos”; Scarcella, “Realtà”; Hunter, Study 59–83, Zeitlin, “Poetics” 425–26; Halperin. 37 See Ettin 11; Park 258; Saïd. 38 There is also a moralizing element; as the focus of the letters moves from the countryside to the city, the morality declines; see Hodkinson 48–53. 39 On this aspect of D & C, see Zeitlin, “Poetics” 430–44. 40 Effe, “Longus” 196–200; on pastoral themes in works of that time, see Miralles. 41 There are, of course, many different positions on the nature of pastoral and the impulses behind pastoral; see Alpers 1–43. 42 Almost every single passage alludes to a work of various Greek authors— Theocritus, Sappho, Philetas, Plato, Thucydides, Homer and many more. See Valley 79–104; Hunter, Study 59–83. Zeitlin calls the text “almost entirely mimetic” (“Poetics” 483). 43 It is art as a renaturalizing distillation of human experience which makes sensible the contradictions inherent in pastoral. On how pastoral blurs the borders between creation and imitation, see Segal, Poetry 4. 44 See also Park 255; Frye, Anatomy 99–101 and 152–53. 45 Gutzwiller, in her analysis of the range of meanings of boukoleō, identifes four intertwining concepts: (1) To act the cowherd, to graze; (2) to tend, watch, guard; (3) to sooth, beguile; (4) to cheat, deceive (“Bucolic Problem”). See also Segal, Poetry 6–8. 46 For this myth, see Hunter, Study 22–31; for more exposition on the Daphnis tradition, see also Morgan, Daphnis 7–8. 47 Vergil Ecl. 5 shows sacrifces made to Daphnis, signifying he is some sort of primal rustic god. 48 Thus Theocritus’ Daphnis is more like Phaedra, who dies because she resists love; see Larson 80; Gutzwiller, Theocritus’ Pastoral Analogies 96–100. 49 On the melancholic aspect of Pastoral, see Rosenmeyer 224–31. 50 Newlands 57. The frame narrator keeps the pastoral world at a distance, like the city folk who come to visit the countryside Dionysia, but demand the nasty bits be cleaned up frst. 51 Classical authors mostly consider the countryside from the urban perspective, seeing it either as a region of pleasant refuge or of barbarity, with little notice of actual agricultural work done; Saïd 83–88; also Morgan, Daphnis 18. 52 See Alpers 33–34, who cites Schiller 211. 53 On whether this myth was Longus’ invention, see Morgan, Daphnis 72; Bowie, “Function” 365–66; Kossaif 582. 54 On these inserted myths, see Bowie, “Function”; Nimis, “Cycles” 197–98; Philippides; Kossaif. 55 This cave can have symbolic signifcance as a womb/entrance to the Earth mother. 56 See Mittelstadt 166–67; Park 263; Reardon, “Mῦθος” 138. 57 Note, too, how in Ver. Ecl. 9 Daphnis is urged to recognize Caesar’s apotheosis. 58 Morgan, Daphnis 8. For the association of Daphnis with Dionysos, see Merkelbach, Hirten. 59 Chalk; Morgan, Daphnis 179–83; Hunter, Study 31–37. 60 Longus cannot quite avoid adding the image of Eros as opponent, as if Daphnis and Chloe were being taught Eros against their will; note how the Nymphs are described pleading with Eros to fnally allow the marriage (4.34.1). 61 On Pan, see Borgeaud, who notes how often Pan is frustrated in love (155–56). Recall that in Achilles’ Tatius, Leucippe undergoes a virginity test apparently

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67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

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administered by Pan using the Syrinx (8.12), and a rather different version of the Pan-Syrinx myth fgures in that novel. Dionysos is also well-integrated into the life of urbanites, and he had multiple rituals which made the god important to the city, such the Lenaia, Agrionia, Katagogia and at the Anthesteria where the wife of the archōn basileus at Athens was ritually united with the god. Pan is in some accounts a general in Dionysos’ Indian campaign; see Morgan, Daphnis 191. It is interesting how the old men, when drunk, discuss their victories. See Morgan, Daphnis 225; Zeitlin, “Poetics.” The narrative of D & C can be seen in part as a parody of a search for philosophic enlightenment; see Bretzigheimer. On Plato’s infuence, see Hunter, “Longus and Plato”; Morgan, Daphnis 174 ff.; Repath, “Platonic Love”; Trapp, “Plato’s Phaedrus.” Gnathon’s speech consists mostly of commonplaces, showing the sort of immoral pseudopaideia the writer of the Tablet of Cebes (34) deplores; see Jones, Playing 26–32. Chalk 37; McCulloh 86. On music in D & C, see Schlapbach; Liviabella Furiani, “Musica”; Maritz. Halliwell, Aesthetics 152–62; Pelosi; Ford. Bowie, “Caging” 180; also Pattoni. This ability to calm and control the herds can be observed in Homer (Il. 18.525– 26), a skill seen in Euripides and even mentioned by Plato (Plt. 268a-b); Gutzwiller, “Bucolic Problem” 386. A neologism I could not resist: Pan + patriarch. Gillespie 429. Herrmann details how Daphnis and Chloe are educated directly by nature, by imitation and by formal education (206–13). On the extent to which nature or culture, is central to their education, see Epstein, “Education”; Herrmann; Maritz; Morgan, “Erotika” 169; Repath, “Platonic Love” 99–122. Pandiri 130–31; Wouters 151–52; Konstan 83. See Arnott; on other connections, including with Persephone, see Kossaif 577–82. Democritus (DK 68 B 154) suggested that we learned weaving from spiders, house building from swallows and so forth; Herrmann 220–21. An animal frequently sacrifced to Dionysos, perhaps because the goats ate the vines; see Otto, Dionysus 168. Xenophon’s Habrocomes and Anthia are explicitly and instantly captivated by the sight of the other; indeed, mirroring Chloe’s initiative, she tries to display as much of her body to Habrocomes as decently possible (Xen. Ephes. 1.3), a theme also stressed in Heliodorus. One can argue that here the Platonic roles of erastēs and erōmenos, while always to some extent shared (for each of them plays the role of the erōmenos who understands their own beauty while seeing it refected in the eyes of the erastēs), switch, with Chloe at frst being the active erastēs and Daphnis the more passive erōmenos, to Daphnis as more active, educating erastēs. Whose name means “male roe deer” having proverbial good eyesight; see Morgan, Daphnis 168. Daphnis’ speech refers to the gods he is connected with: Zeus, Pan and Dionysos. She is wearing a pine crown, sitting under a tree, is musical and exists in a pastoral setting. See Morgan, Daphnis 172; also Chalk 40; Hunter, Study 52; MacQueen, Myth 91 ff.; Montiglio, Love 140.

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84 Gillespie 234; see also Bowie, “Function” 366; Montiglio, Love 141. 85 On this garden, see McCulloh 93 ff.; Zeitlin, “Poetics”; Teske. 86 There are some interesting similarities between the actions of Philetas and Dorcon his virtual pupil: (1) As Dorcon made possible Daphnis’ participation in a contest where he was judged and won, which led to a sequence of events during which there was an attempted abduction of Chloe (by him), Philetas presides over a trial where Daphnis will be judged and win, which begins a sequence of events leading to the abduction of Chloe; (2) Daphnis is captured in circumstances recalling the Homeric Hymn to Dionysos; Chloe is saved in circumstances recalling that same Homeric Hymn; (3) the Phatta myth is told, but Chloe’s actions reverse it, in ways that empower a woman, for Chloe uses the pipes of their teacher Dorcon; the Syrinx myth is told, and Daphnis, through music, retells the myth in a way that somewhat protects the woman, and is granted the pipes of his would be educator, Philetas. A major infection in their love occurred when Daphnis was nearly lost, likewise now, when Chloe is nearly lost. 87 Class inversion is seen in the simile involving jackdaws, who usually are scattered by hawks or eagles in Homer; see Morgan, Daphnis 188–89. 88 Chloe’s capture, perhaps connected to a tradition about Piplea, loved by Daphnis and abducted by robbers, teasingly suggests potential plot developments; Morgan, Daphnis 189. 89 This alludes to Pan’s activity at Marathon, but there is also a tradition that Pan was a general in Dionysos’ campaign in India, all pointing to the positive side of his Pan potential, a feature also of the Pan myths in L & K. 90 On the myths’ violence, see Hunter, “Ancient Readers” 53; Pandiri 130; Chalk 40–42. 91 Lamon says he obtained the song from a Sicilian goatherd, for the fee of a goat and a syrinx, alluding to Theocritus, who was said to have written a poem called the Syrinx, as well as to Id. 8.84–87, where a goat and a syrinx were the proposed fee for teaching the song; Morgan, Daphnis 195. 92 Schlapbach considers that Daphnis and Chloe are unaware of myth’s implications (90, citing Winkler, Constraints 120). Yet, soon after, Chloe refuses Daphnis’ Pan oath, suggesting an awareness of the negatives of the myth. 93 Hubbard 102; Hunter, Study 81–82; Deligiorgis 4. 94 Earlier, when Philetas tells them about love’s symptoms, Daphnis and Chloe come to similar conclusions, using similar words (2.8.2–3), thus showing similar thinking processes; see Montiglio, Love 149. 95 When later he is teaching her music, he takes the pipes from her, supposed to correct her playing, but in fact to give her a kiss (1.24.4), rendering the pipes a form of Chloe; see Montiglio, Love 141. 96 Such an exteme winter is apparently not impossible for Lesbos; Morgan, Daphnis 201, citing Green 210. 97 Note that epithalamia manifest a long tradition of using description of animal copulation to encourage the newly married couple’s frst sexual experience; Di Meo 97–99. 98 Her name may derive from the name of the nymph Lyca who loved Daphnis; see Morgan, Daphnis 209. I would also suggest an overtone of Aphrodite, who also has an unsatisfying husband and who seduces Anchises the shepherd. 99 Here arises the issue of an act of horrifc violence suffered by woman made into a beautiful experience; certainly, many imaginative works likewise render scenes of beings suffering horrifc violence (e.g., Jesus being crucifed) as ravishing music or art. For a readable discussion of this matter in respect to art, see Danto.

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 161 100 The story of Marsyas can refer to the perils of one challenging one social betters. 101 Winkler, Constraints 112; Konstan 18; Morgan, Daphnis 229. 102 Perhaps, a horse is just a horse (of course!), but I cannot shake the feeling their riding on the same horse suggests a uniting passion. 103 Montiglio notices the similarity of Chloe’s fight and that of Syrinx, including some, no doubt intentional verbal echoes (Love 150). I think this signposts an imminent and dangerous crux for the couple. Syrinx ran away due to Pan’s hybrid nature; and, as Daphnis mingles well with the city party, a new (and perhaps frightening) dimension of his character is observed. 104 See a similar speech, aimed at seduction by Kleitophon, in Ach. Tat. 1.7–9. 105 Perhaps, a partial recollection of the theme of Eros having to humble an arrogant foe, but this might also mean Eros will no longer so directly intervene as before. 106 This banquet shows Dionysos’ wealth, and the universality of Eros’ realm; the  reference to Hermes may also reference to Hom. Od. 7.137 ff. See Morgan, Daphnis 245.

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Heliodorus’ Aithiopika

General background As noted, Heliodorus’ Aithiopika,1 the most complicated extant Greek novel,2 combines Callirhoe’s historical realism and political unconscious with the greater use of supernatural and religious themes of Daphnis and Chloe (D & C). I regard the Aithiopika as a religion-infected, Meroeoriented legend of the marvelous child Charikleia, a narrative constructed out of a differently Hellenized or Easternized Greek tradition, in which the streams of Persinna’s, Kalasiris’ and Theagenes’ subplots feed the novel’s main current. The chief utopian vectors are found at the political- and religious-historical level, in how Charikleia has a divinely devised role as a perfecter of a superlative Meroe; there are usual concerns for how sex and sōphrosynē, individual desires and social roles can be reconciled. Diverse and tragic careers of desire are manifested, but, in the stories of Charikleia, Theagenes, Persinna and Kalasiris, desire reveals a path out of tragedy to a better, even exalted, state. And, as with D & C, the acceptability of my reading will depend on readerly tastes and presuppositions. The Aithiopika presents elaborate narrative games and intertextualities,3 particularly the much-discussed opening scene.4 Heliodorus mixes realism, myth, fantasy, dense literary echoes, comedy and much else.5 Like the coils of Psellos’ snakes, multiple and tangled narratives eventually merge into the master narrative of Charikleia,6 just as at Meroe several streams converge into one Nile, whose source is Ethiopia, Charikleia’s ultimate origin, its numerous paradoxes making major interpretive demands.7 While not so profoundly mimetic as D & C, the intensely visual Aithiopika also “reverberates with echoes of earlier authors,”8 including historians,9 engaging in what Telò calls “predatory poetics.”10 Heliodorus especially utilizes Homeric epic and the Odyssey where Kalasiris, Charikleia and even Theagenes recall Odysseus;11 understandably so, for the Odyssey functions as a quest/coming-of-age/initiation myth,12 with the withdrawal-devastationreturn sequence added.13 Heliodorus also provides numerous theatrical references14 whose structures and other elements contribute to the vividness of Heliodorus’ exposition (Morgan, “History” 260–61). DOI: 10.4324/9781003036647-5

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The Aithiopika unfolds a complex and determined divine plan over time,15 with varied supernatural warnings and interventions, a kind of mystic pilgrimage for the protagonists and reader alike (Whitmarsh, Narrative 111 and 129), as well as a tale of restoration, a return to an origin thought lost.16 It reproduces the very human confict between seeing wonders and the strange events of life as glimpses into divine operations or exposing a hostile universe ruled by baleful, if not demonic, powers.17 I believe that Heliodorus proffers “serious intentions,” not just hermeneutic games. Morgan (Ethiopian Story 350–51) considers the Aithiopika “religiose.” While the novel does not present coherent philosophical systems, its religion and theosophy are more than mere décor.18 Considering the large amount of realistic detail and how many readers and critics (e.g., Philip the Philosopher to Jean Alvares) have found in it profound meanings, I am persuaded that Heliodorus expects his work, at least for a certain audience, to offer a reward greater than “all the money in the world” (2.23.4), containing “things that are truly mystical and imbued with a pleasure that is indeed divine” (5.16.3). Heliodorus’ “mysteriosophic language” (Whitmarsh, “Writes” 31) refects, in my opinion, elements of a personal dream of religion, not a belief such events were possible. An instructive comparison can be made between the novels of Heliodorus and Apuleius (Smith, “Wonders”). Both Heliodorus and Apuleius have non-Greco-Roman backgrounds, living in places that had received (or would receive) imperial attention—Syria and North Africa. Such authors often approached the quasi-canonical Greco-Roman tradition from new perspectives.19 Both novels open up with much-discussed prologues that suggest their novel’s complexity and exoticism, prefguring various interpretative problems to come. Both novels describe a coming-ofage story in which a long diffcult series of trials occur along with struggles to fnd truth and a true home. Both novels have protagonists who partially exchange their Greek home for an (sometimes problematically) ideal nonGreek habitation. In Book 11 of the Metamorphoses, what we thought was going to be a novel about a young man’s encounters with magic is revealed to be the story of how that young man became a pastophor at Rome and a lawyer; the tenth book of the Aithiopika reveals that what we (and the protagonists) thought was mainly a love story turns out to be a wider story about how the Gods are working together to end human sacrifce at Meroe.20 The Aithiopika’s narrative can appear linear;21 its main narrated action, beginning in Delphi and leaving Greece, never returns.22 But Faulkner’s famous quote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (Requiem for a Nun), is particularly true of Heliodorus’ novel,23 where events are connected to parts of the divine plan, which operates by frequent repetition, past and present being one continuum, even respecting minor characters like Thisbe and Nausikles (Hefti 121–27). Ultimately, the stories of Odysseus and Charikleia are circular, ending where they began, although the story of Odysseus’ antitype, Theagenes, is linear. But a better critical distinction is between secondary and primary epic (Lewis 12 ff.), seen in the difference

164 Heliodorus’ Aithiopika between the Aeneid and the Odyssey, which makes Greece the normalizing standard, against with various other cultures are measured, where in the end the status quo is reconfrmed.24 Secondary epic often does not perform a culturally normalizing role, and its circumstances demand radical change and frequently a decisive break with past events. The protagonist often does not end up where he/she started and can be involved in the world-historical change. Thus, Aeneid’s Aeneas, after Troy’s destruction, must return the Trojans to their original home to become Romans, agents of Jupiter’s worldhistorical plans. In Heliodorus’ revision of Homer, instead of Greece being the standard and non-Greek cultures representing various forms of excess and strangeness from which Odysseus must escape or which provide secondary narratives of little import, in the Aithiopika it is the normalizing Odyssey narrative that must give way to the primarily Eastern story of the marvelous child Charikleia and her (imported) consort Theagenes.

Historical background and political-historical options The events of the Aithiopika take place sometime between the invasion of Egypt by Cambyses (525 BCE) and Alexander’s battles with Persia (333 BCE). Hydaspes seems to be the Ethiopian king in Herodotus (Elmer; Szepessy 248). The principal area of action is Egypt, followed by Delphi and Meroe, plus parts of the Mediterranean region. There is a considerable amount of real-world detail as well as fantasy.25 The main action takes place in the spring into the early summer and begins at the Heracleotic mouth of the Nile and ends around 50 days later in Meroe, but fashbacks detail Charikleia’s conception in Ethiopia. As does Callirhoe, Heliodorus presents a large number of political options, with the Aithiopika as a tale of three countries (Szepessy 254; Dowden, “Heliodoros” 280). The Boukoloi recall archaic people who often practiced banditry (see Thucydides’ “Archaeology”), also recalling those contemporary Egyptians who had fed their villages to escape taxation and other forms of oppression. The pirates also allude to other political issues and pathologies. The pirates are like men besieging a city (5.24.4), recalling Thucydides, especially in the phrase “an armistice with no formal guarantees, . . . a peace that was no peace at all” (5.25.2), suggesting how in war words change their meaning (Thuc. 3.82.4). Note the description of the battling pirate factions: “Some sided with Trachinos, bawling that the leader must be respected; others with Peloros, clamoring that the law must be upheld” (5.32.1). Greece appears only in fashbacks. Theagenes, Achilles’ supposed direct descendent, represents the glories of archaic, mythical Greece, Charikles and Delphi Classical Greece,26 Knemon and Thisbe Classical and Hellenistic Athens. However, the problematical Charikles represents the failure of that Delphic potential, and Athens Heliodorus’ decayed postclassical world; Knemon’s story clearly evokes both tragedy, New Comedy, mime, Athenian oratory and legal procedure and anticipates Arsake’s drama.27 This makes

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Athenian love not only seem tragic and base, but also farcical (Webb). Smith (“Wonders”) suggests that Knemon, seen in his ephebic uniform after the Panathenaia (1.10.1), recalls Athens’ role as an ultimate might-make-right imperial hegemon, with subject allies.28 As in Chariton, it is the Dorians, not the Ionians, who embody true Hellenic virtue. Yet Heliodorus can underscore Greek superiority; Theagenes refuses to be awed by the “hollow pomp and show of Persia” and bow, after which Arsake states that such scornful attitudes are typical of Greeks (7.19.1–2).29 Kalasiris and Memphis embody the mysteries, fakery and brutality found in traditions about Egypt,30 revealing abiding fantasies as well as some contemporary realities.31 Heliodorus’ Egypt is the “world’s temple,” a place of divine wonders, with a substantial reputation concerning magic (Futre Pinheiro, “Heliodorus” 78). Egypt is often other, a terrifying place of cunning thieves, bandit hordes and evil magicians, the liminal, transitional space which must be crossed to get to Ethiopia, the place of ultimate wisdom (Dowden, “Heliodoros” 281; Whitmarsh, “Writes” 26–27). Contrast Kalasiris, having few outwardly Egyptian characteristics, with his son Thyamis, whose attempted murder of Charikleia is paradigmatically Eastern and Barbarian.32 Egypt functions as an archetypal “demonic underworld” which the quest/coming-of-age protagonist must enter to suffer, receive training and be proved, before returning home with adult status. In leaving Greece, Charikleia leaves one identity; in Egypt, she assumes different identities, such as coming from Ephesus (along with Theagenes, disguised as her brother), being a stand-in for Thisbe or becoming an Odyssean beggar. The episode in which the old woman revives her son (and Charikleia gets information about Theagenes) is modeled on Odysseus’ journey to the underworld. Egypt is a virtual Deadland from which Charikleia (whom by now Persinna thinks is dead) must escape, thus making the tania and the pantarbe stone grave offerings (Hilton, “Ethiopian Paradox” 83–84). Trials and false accusations are a staple of such underworlds and, during her trial, her confession of Kybele’s murder is Charikleia’s lowest point—and her fguratively dancing among the hell fames is the beginning of her journey upward to regain identity. Heliodorus’ novel, like Chariton’s, presents Persia as an aggressive empire ruled by corrupt and oppressive leaders who initiate war to gain material wealth. As in Chariton, the Persians, suffering signifcant defeats, barely manage to retain Egypt; here the Persians are actually defeated. Whether one opts for the third- or fourth-century date, the Roman state is under threat, a circumstance which, to some Easterners, might appear a proper comeuppance.33 As Chariton, largely through the trial at Babylon, its aftermath and the actions of the eunuch Artaxates, make the nature of despotism clear, so Arsake’s behavior explicates Persian despotism (Smith, “Wonders” 230–31). Note how, in counter to Thyamis’ protest about how Arsake has made Charikleia and Theagenes slaves, Arsake says: “You can make all the fne speeches you like, with your meaningless defnitions of equity, propriety,

166 Heliodorus’ Aithiopika and expediency. He who holds absolute power needs none of these things: his will serves for them all” (8.5). Heliodorus’ Ethiopia is drawn mostly from literature; I favor Morgan’s (“Heliodorus the Hellene”) point that Heliodorus could have made his Ethiopians and Egyptians a lot more Other than he does; Apuleius provides a good counterexample, where his depiction of the Isis cult shows decidedly non-Greek aspects.34 Since Homer, Ethiopia was often seen as a utopian habitation on the world’s edge.35 Heliodorus’ Meroe is an Isle of the Blessed, a place of natural wonders (10.5). Meroe may be an idealized refection of Heliodorus’ Emesa, also home to the sun cult (Whitmarsh, Narrative 110; Altheim). Its depiction refects its importance as a commercial hub as well as myths of Queen Candace, who outwits Alexander in the Alexander Romance tradition; in Acts, her eunuch is taught by Philip the evangelist. Heliodorus reproduces the common confusion of Ethiopia and India, probably drawing upon Philostratus.36 Meroe is partially a projection of Greek fantasy, and its true wisdom is compatible with Greek culture, which corresponds to how depictions of “barbarians” in Late antiquity often underscored what was best about Greek and Roman culture (Heather 235–36). Note that the Ethiopian upper classes speak Greek (e.g., 10.9.6, 10.15.1 and 10.35.2), which may have some historical basis.37 Its population worships Greek gods, and Ethiopian religion seems an extension of Neoplatonic/Neopythagorean theosophy. For most of the nationalities involved, Heliodorus uses known or plausible sounding names,38 but his Ethiopian personal names draw upon an amalgam of traditions, suggesting them as a hybrid international culture.39 The fact that they worship the Greek Perseus, Andromeda and also Memnon suggests primordial hybridity that is being restored with a fresh infusion of Greekness. In contrast to the Persian empire, the just multiethnic empire in a microcosm that Chaereas creates at Syracuse already exists in Ethiopia; Hydaspes rules a world-spanning empire that includes Eastern (Indian)40 and Western Ethiopians and has allies in the Troglodytai, Arabians, Blemmyes and even the Chinese.41 Hydaspes’ Ethiopians successfully resist an expansionist power, recalling Herodotus’ superlative Ethiopians who rebuffed Persian aggression (Hdt. 3.19–26),42 as well as Chariton’s Hermocrates who repelled the Athenian expedition. Book 9 and the siege at Syene are the novel’s most historiographical sections (Morgan, “Heliodoros” 418–21). There, Hydaspes, leading the army against Syene, commands a vast “barbarian horde,” as once did Xerxes (Elmer 427).43 In Ammianus, Sapor II approaches Amida (19.1), who he thinks will surrender, and is deeply angered at their insulting rebuff and vows to destroy the city. Hydaspes is similarly outraged at Syene and also vows to destroy it (9.2; Ross, “Syene” 14–15). Yet, despite his anger, Hydaspes does not exceed what is just, nor seeks to expand his realm, like the Ethiopians in Herodotus. His response to Oroondates (9.25) about his willingness to keep to his natural boundaries and make peace with Persia shows him an ideal leader, which echoes, in a way, Chaereas’ letter to

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Artaxerxes while giving back Statira, as well as the meeting between Agesilaus and Pharnabazos in Plutarch and Xenophon.44 Meroe’s government pursues a celestial harmony through the worship of the Sun and Moon, with a priest-king at its head and an advisory council of philosopher-saints, the gymnosophists (recalling the Brahmins; Sandy, “Characterization” 153), having correspondences with the solar-celestialoriented theologies of later antiquity as well as philosophical utopias like Iambulus’ City of the Sun or Zeno of Citium’s Stoic Cosmopolis; Philostratus provides a reason to locate the gymnosophists in Ethiopia but makes them inferior to those in India.45 While Meroe is no democracy, Hydaspes, like Hermocrates, is a clever and effective military leader who shows mercy and tries to follow the rule of law and the way of Heaven.46 When the priests at Syene call him “a god and savior” (9.22), a popular designation for some Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors, Hydaspes rejects this salutation. As Sisimithres notes, the Ethiopian King too is subject to the law (10.10.3), and Hydaspes sees the proving of Charikleia’s identity as a kind of trial process (10.9.3 and 10.10.1–3)—which he allows himself to lose. As the romance of Meroe, the Aithiopika corresponds to Frye’s fourth and ffth phases, wherein an already ideal society, part of the cosmic order, is defended, improved or extended. In Book 10, clear class divisions are fgured by the ring of soldiers that separate the commons from the sacrifcing elite (10.6), how at critical moments the rulers speak Greek (10.9.6 and 10.39.1) and the set-apart altar of Dionysos which accepts all manner of offerings. Later, I show how people’s acceptance of Charikleia of multiple fathers (and particularly of non-Ethiopian Theagenes) as Ethiopian rulers and Hydaspes’ abandonment of oppressive prior forms of the word of the father in deference to Sisimithres’ superior theosophic wisdom suggests a substantially reformed, inclusive and unifed state. The abolishment of Meroe’s ancestral custom of human sacrifce47 epitomizes the process of breaking free of all those still surviving archaic and barbaric (yet popular) social practices, a concrete task needed for progress. According to Philostratus (VA 3.20.1–2), the early Ethiopians in India were ruled by Ganges, the son of the river Ganges, whom they murdered.48 They were forced to wander (presumably to Ethiopia) until they sacrifced the murderers. Thus, human sacrifce was associated with the stable founding of the Ethiopian state. This helps explain why later they chose to sacrifce Andromeda to the angered gods. But Perseus successfully thwarted the sacrifce and renewed the Ethiopian ruling lineage through his union with Andromeda, although he returned to Greece. Charikleia again will be in danger of being sacrifced by her father (named also for a river) but through the efforts of Theagenes (and others, of course) she will end the custom of human sacrifce.49 Hydaspes’ shortcomings also arise from his commitment to protect the word of the father and patriarchal power. He exhibits an obsessive fear of illegitimacy and thus of women, even at great cost to himself and his family. This commitment caused Charikleia’s exile and Persinna’s years of torment, just

168 Heliodorus’ Aithiopika as Chaereas’ ill-founded suspicion of adultery indirectly caused the exile of their own child. But Hydaspes’ merciful treatment of Syene and Oroondates foreshadow his eventual reform. Bandits form an element of the novel’s political unconscious, as well as serving as plot drivers. How is it that Thyamis, former bandit leader, is so easily rehabilitated as a high priest at Memphis? Although Hippothoos, Thyamis’ model, is rehabilitated too, it is as a private citizen and foreigner. Both circumstances refect Hobsbawm’s concept of “social banditry,” a primitive form of the class struggle, where the opposition posed by the oppressed is seen, offcially, as mere banditry, but in fact can comprise an alternative, resisting social order—thus Thyamis’ bandits have a complex village hidden in the marshes.50 Thyamis, displaced from his rightful position, naturally gravitates toward the outlaws, until he regains his position. And as Hippothoos (indirectly) helped Habrocomes regain Anthia, so initially Thyamis also (unintentionally) helps the couple. Note he gets a prophetic, riddling dream commending Charikleia to him (1.18), as Kalasiris his father does later. Thyamis, intending to choose Charikleia out of the spoils, unlike Agamemnon, democratically asks his fellow bandits for permission, turns his island into a parliament (1.19) and even asks for Charikleia’s consent (1.19.6), showing many qualities of an ideal protagonist.51

The Aithiopika and the revision of canonical myth with a marginal perspective All the extant ancient Greek novels display the world from noncanonical, non-Hellenocentric perspectives. From the Ethiopian perspective, Charikleia has been exiled to the edges of the earth, and Theagenes has followed her there, a reversal of the Odyssean nostos (10.16.6).52 Many characters are pseudo-Greeks (Charikleia, Kalasiris and even the canonical Homer). Knemon, dressed as an Egyptian, meets Kalasiris wearing Greek clothing (Whitmarsh, “Birth” 97–101). Kalasiris likewise rewrites Homer, whose life story he has constructed in the likeness of himself and Charikleia, a metaphor for how Heliodorus is rewriting Greek literary history, reconfguring the Homeric traditions and others for his own purposes, grafting within the Hellenic strata non-Hellenic parts (100–07), thus suggesting that the truest expression of Hellenic values lies outside Hellas. As mentioned, during the Second Sophistic, there were many supposed revisions of canonical Greek tales, which should include Heliodorus’ novel, and this fact gives another instance of Greek interactions with the East.53 We shall discuss various examples of how Heliodorus “corrects” classical literature, such as the Oedipus Tyrannus or Seven Against Thebes (Bretzigheimer, “Brudermord”). Hydaspes’ own Ethiopian dynasty was born due to the intervention of Perseus earlier and is renewed through the intervention of Theagenes later. There is an implicit critique of historical Greeks in their failure to respect

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higher Greek standards; this is certainly true in the case of Knemon and company, and Nausikles, but also of Charikles, whom Sisimithres sees as Greek exemplar (2.31). Yet Heliodorus’ use of the character of Theagenes as Perseus redux, as well as the Meroitic barbarism of human sacrifce, suggests that there are qualities among the most excellent Greeks (e.g., Perseus and Achilles) that are lacking even among the Ethiopians. I would suggest that this quality resides in the best examples of Greek heroism; Perseus goes to the ends of the earth as part of a quest to protect his mother, as well as eliminate a threat to the male order; Achilles initially joins the Trojan expedition out of a sheer desire for glory, which turns into a tragic pursuit of proper action in a morally problematical world. Meroitic society is stable because its rulers and people support such rigid rules, but their obedience is not linked to a true understanding of the divine will. The intervention of Charikleia and Theagenes will change this.

Some religion and philosophy Heliodorus, like Apuleius, refects a time of great religious complexity and change. Helios (equated with Apollo) and Artemis (equated with Selene and Isis) are novel’s central gods.54 There was no such Artemis cult as Heliodorus describes it at Delphi; the true goddess Charikleia serves is probably Selene (Dowden, “Heliodoros” 281–82; Merklebach, Roman 240). The novel’s postscript associates Heliodorus with Emesa and its Helios cult (10.41.4). Emperor Julian makes the Emesan sun cult part of his Neoplatonic synthesis of classical paganism, as seen in his Hymn to King Helios Dedicated to Sallust (Or 4);55 Helios was long associated with Ethiopia, whose Helios is equated with Apollo by Charikles, perhaps implying, due to shared values, that each culture can infuse new life into the other. Due to the considerable worship of Unconquered Sun, often associated with Mithras (Beck, Religion), Theagenes’ bull wrestling probably had resonances with Mithraism. Diodorus has the Ethiopians’ worship Pan, Zeus, Isis and Hercules (3.9.1–2), as well as the sun, moon and the entire universe. At Meroe, there is an altar to Dionysos apart from the altars of the Sun and Moon, where only pure animals can be sacrifced, fguring class distinctions. Heliodorus’ religion has a philosophical (particularly Platonic) cast, although by Heliodorus’ era neo-Pythagoreans, neoplatonists and stoics had somewhat merged (Dowden, “Heliodoros”; Sandy, “Characterization”), with the gods being outward forms of a less defnite divine system. Gymnosophists meet at the temple of Pan, which probably refers to Pan as the “All.”56 The physical and philosophical purity practiced by Charikleia and Kalasiris echo aspects of Pythagorean practice,57 and the harmony of the heavens maintained at Meroe may have a Pythagorean favor. Note how Meroe is (wrongly) depicted as a triangular island of symmetric proportions and the reference to the numerological signifcance of the name of the Nile

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(9.22). Philostratus shows how Brahman’s thought is superior to Greeks, yet he describes that thought in very Greek (mostly Platonic) terms, as does Heliodorus.58 Heliodorus’ utopian Meroitic fantasy is based upon the mythical Ethiopians, the Ethiopians of Herodotus, the Indians of the Apollonius tradition, late antique theosophic religion and idealized forms of the Helios-cult of Emesa. The Aithiopika presents the religious myth of a marvelous child Charikleia, agent of the divine plan to rid Meroe of human sacrifce and renew its hybrid harmonies, combining, as seen below, through Charikleia’s four fathers and spouse, the best of Ethiopia, Epic and Classical Greece and Egypt, as well as the human and the divine. Heliodorus’ fantasy is that, outside the Hellenocentric world, a superior hybridizing non-Greek culture, enriching its own traditions with Greek thought, could activate undiscovered potentials, rather like Greek philosophy took Hebrew theology to a newer level in Christianity. Just as the superb Syracusans produced a Callirhoe, whose relationship with Chaereas brought renewal to Syracuse, in part through a population infusion from outside, so the excellent inhabitants of Meroe produce a Charikleia whose adventures will conclude with the elimination of human sacrifce and, in a replay of the Perseus– Andromeda episode, bring a new infusion of Greekness into Meroe. The ending is thought to be a paradigm of complete closure,59 although with surprising revelations.60

Archetypes, aretalogies, apocalypse and anagogy Although technically Hydaspes’ daughter, Charikleia, conceived as Persinna viewed a painting of Andromeda (whom she resembles exactly), is in a sense “fathered” by the picture,61 rather like a Platonic form come to Earth. Notice the power of love at frst sight also aligns with how she is conceived by her mother’s glance at the painting (Anderson, “ΣΩΦΡΟΣΥΝΗ” 320). When Charikles describes her, he calls her an archetupon agalma which draws to her all eyes and hearts (2.33.3).62 She is like a living archetype that draws people to her for the reason beauty in Plato draws people—beauty best recalls the archetypes once known. When the bandits see her, they wonder if the girl is a living statue of a goddess (1.7.2).63 The sight of Charikleia draws the wounded Theagenes’ eyes upward and sustains his life (1.2) as she will raise him to a higher level. A further notion of preexistence is stressed by Platonic echoes in their fall into love at frst sight (3.5.4–5) and Kalasiris’ comment on how, at that instant, “your souls recognized partners worthy of each other” (4.10).64 This falling-in-love also evokes Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium about how lovers are attracted to something similar65 and the passage in the Phaedrus on the soul’s recollection of beauty (249d-251d).66 By extension, it suggests that the couple is repeating archetypal patterns67 and that Theagenes and Charikleia will enact an improved version of the original Perseus and Andromeda story.68 Diotima in the Symposium contrasts

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children of the body with children of the mind, and the manner in which Kalasiris sees Charikleia and Theagenes as his “unmothered” children has Platonic overtones.69 Embracing “as if of one fesh” (5.4.5), they recall the joined lovers of Aristophanes’ myth (Symp. 192b–c and 192e), suggesting their fundamental unity (Paulsen 42). The Aithiopika abounds in images and motifs common to aretalogies (Edsall). Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesian Romance, which presents a virtual aretalogy of Artemis of Ephesus (whose protagonists set up a dedication to Artemis), was a model for Heliodorus’ novel.70 For example, as Xenophon’s protagonists meet during a procession for Artemis of Ephesus, Heliodorus’ protagonists meet at a procession devoted to Neoptolemus. Charikleia tells Knemon they are from Ephesus (1.21–22) and claims to be a priestess of Ephesian Artemis. As does Xenophon’s oracle (but with more coherence), Heliodorus’ oracle previews the romance plot. Ephesian Artemis was a major goddess, and Charikleia’s falsehood reveals what Charikleia thinks is her relationship to that goddess.71 Even Thyamis, bandit leader, a threat to Charikleia, once restored to his proper station, becomes eventually a friend and helper of the couple and is modeled on Xenophon of Ephesus’ Hippothous (Alvares, “Drama”). The careers of Charikleia and Theagenes refect themes of mystery religion, and the series of trials at Meroe recalls such rituals, including the unveiling of objects of deep mystery—the Andromeda painting and Charikleia. Egypt is a virtual underworld, and Persinna thinks Charikleia might be dead. Initiation is a form of death and rebirth; in a sense, Charikleia will be resurrected. The couple’s transition to a married and higher religious state fgures how individuals can be spiritually reborn. Bloch linked the themes of revolution with apocalypse/eschaton, a radical break with the past that creates a new future and thus recreates and redeems the prior events; such ideal themes fll the Aithiopika’s latter third. There is a battle of world empires (the Persian and the Meroitic) in which a great city is taken and the elements confused as the Nile is diverted around Syene, a paradox the text underscores (9.5.5). The virginity test upon the fery grate has eschatological correlates,72 as does Theagenes’ bout with the Ethiopian giant.73 As noted, in many eschatological discourses the radical break comes with the appearance of a messiah fgure; Charikleia’s peculiar status, striking appearance and divinely mandated origin (4.8.4) make her such a transformational fgure. Here the past is reincorporated and purifed. Charikleia exactly resembles Andromeda, the frst creatrix of Ethiopia, who was also offered as a human sacrifce by her parents, and would have been killed but for Perseus’ arrival; but now, instead of the primal crime repeating itself,74 Charikleia’s father will come to reject human sacrifce. We see the unifed, inclusive, harmonious and festal society in the wedding of Charikleia and Theagenes, a union of the priest of the Sun with the priestess of the Moon, which takes place via miracles at a critical juncture in Meroe’s history. As Andromeda married a noble Greek and with him founded a new kingdom, Charikleia

172 Heliodorus’ Aithiopika will marry a Greek who claims descent from the original Hellenes;75 these repetitions and renewals of prior events suggest a return to the primordial creation time,76 again making the novel’s events part of a profound cosmichistorical pattern. Charikleia herself merges several worlds; she is born of Ethiopian royalty, secluded in the Ethiopian countryside by Sisimithres, then raised at Delphi by the priest Charikles, obtains a third foster father in the Egyptian priest Kalasiris and fnally marries Theagenes, a descendent of Achilles. Charikleia and Theagenes as future rulers will blend the best of Ethiopia, Greece and even Egypt. As D & C describes how the children of the protagonists are introduced to pastoral ways, the marriage of Theagenes and Charikleia is taken with a view to the future, to bearing children (10.40.2). Through this and Charikleia’s paradoxical racial makeup, Heliodorus’ text subverts the relevance of race and ethnicity, implying the possibility of greater unity between people. Eschatological discourse commonly features a radical recentering, where the marginal becomes central; Whitmarsh argues that Heliodorus’ novel asks its readers to reorient themselves, placing Meroe, not Greece, in the central position from which the rest of the world is considered (“Birth” 98–101). The archetypal story of Charikleia’s origins is the “hermeneutic key for the explanation of her supernatural character,” and Heliodorus underscores her supernatural, uncanny nature (Hilton, “Ethiopian Paradox” 85–86). There is clearly something either sacred or demonic about her birth, and, like Alexander in the Alexander Romance, she fts no mold (10.7.3). Charikleia is clearly a marvelous, if not supernatural child,77 and her history is written on a special band in magical-seeming characters. As Charikleia’s story, the Aithiopika conforms to Frye’s frst, second and third-phase romances, dominated by the Quest pattern, where the protagonist’s wanderings and quest are connected with the attainment (or resumption) of status. The Aithiopika is also a comedy, in that it concerns the breaking of baleful laws and situations and the reformation of society, fgured by marriage. Charikleia is the child of an excellent King and Queen of a superlative state, conceived after her father is given a divine command to mate. Like other miraculous children, her birth as impossibly white would be a source of scandal to her black mother, Persinna, and represents a threat to her father. Her sorrowing mother must deprive her of her birthright through exile. The marvelous child often enjoys an idyllic, pastoral childhood as does Charikleia, frst among the shepherds of the Ethiopian countryside (2.31), then within Apollo’s temple as Charikles’ adoptive daughter in quasi-idyllic surroundings and utter innocence, virtue and ignorance of her true identity.78 As a seven-year-old (2.30.6), she was unusually tall, with divine beauty; Sisimithres asserts that, even as an infant, Charikleia had something marvelous in the look of her eyes. Her otherworldly gaze sets her apart; note Kalasiris declares that one can detect gods in human form by the sharpness of their glance (3.13.2). At Memphis, Charikleia dances about the fames, and fnally at Meroe, standing upon the faming grate, she shines as if divinity. From

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a Meroitic perspective, she is exiled to the edges of the earth, and leaving Delphi to cross the sea to Egypt, symbolically enters a type of Underworld where she and Theagenes are profoundly tested. Her life and career tracks between holy cities—Meroe, Delphi, Memphis and back to Meroe. With the appearance of Kalasiris (her chief magic helper), and the later arrival of Theagenes, she can begin her quest. Her exile from Ethiopia is also a form of education; Charikleia’s personal quest is for the secret of her true identity, homeland and past, rather like the goals of Vergil’s Aeneas in his epic’s frst half, which is also the great secret of Meroitic history. As in other novels, problematical characters will serve the greater good and be partially redeemed and good characters perfected. While Knemon’s story is a mix of New Comedy and tragedy, the long conversation between Kalasiris and Knemon, with the nature of love as its subtext, on the banks of the Nile rather than the banks of Ilisus, is meant to recall the Phaedrus, with Kalasiris engaging in some Socratic psychagogia.79 Kalasiris’ account puts greater stress on the uncertainty of life and thus Knemon’s internal debate (6.7.5) pits his loyalty toward Charikleia and Theagenes against the outcome’s uncertainty. The ultimately comic Knemon opts for the security of an immediate marriage and returns home (Grethlein 324). We will detail the rehabilitation of Kalasiris and Persinna below.

Learning the divine plan: the descent and ascent A central question in the Aithiopika’s drama concerns developing trust in a divine plan whose operations defy expectation, probability and reason, avoiding despair and fnding hope. Initially on the beach, through Charikleia is mistaken for a goddess, she despairs: “It depends on you [Theagenes] . . . whether I live or die” (1.2.4; also 5.33.1).80 Note she asks the bandits to kill them to put them out of their misery. Although the narrator declares this spectacle had been arranged by the divinity (1.1), Charikleia is nearly convinced that their lives are governed by evil daimones who give good fortune to prolong their torture (Morgan, “Heliodoros” 453–54). She has a near meltdown as she contemplates how the problematical Knemon is about to marry Nausikeia while she still waits for Theagenes (6.84). She surrenders to that hopelessness at Memphis in an attempted suicide. But after that great trial, during her later virginity test on Meroe’s faming grate, she displays the triumphant near-goddess soon to overcome the despair of Book 1 to actualize her archetypal potential. But frst, they must endure the Egyptian hell-world. Earlier, Theagenes and Charikleia were marched off to the camp of the bandit king Thyamis. They are tended by the Athenian Knemon, whose story, the novel’s frst extended tale, sets out important themes (Morgan, “Story”). As Charikleia bemoans their fates, the reader might wonder how hellish is the netherworld of testing they have entered. They have just escaped the brutalities of Trachinus and Pelorus and have no reason to think that the Egyptian bandits

174 Heliodorus’ Aithiopika would be any better. Kalasiris is missing. But a sudden hope: Theagenes suggests they supplicate the gods; on divine cue Knemon reveals himself to be an Athenian Greek with a meaningful story (1.8).81 Recall how in Odyssey’s Book 1 the discouraged Telemachus gets a divine visitation from Athena that raises his spirits. Knemon’s tragic tale shows justice working out with Demainete’s death (1.14–17). Later, the manner of Thisbe’s demise also reveals more benevolent divine machinery (2.4–10). The conversation between Zeus and Athena concerning Orestes’ vengeance on Aigisthos (Hom. Od. 1.29–43) foretells how Odysseus will get justice and avenge himself against those abusing his wife; the story of Demainete and Thisbe (Charikleia’s demonic doublet)82 suggests that the truth will come out, justice will be done and Knemon will, after struggles, fnd his home; likewise, Charikleia, also in exile due to sexual scandal, will eventually gain justice and fnd her true home (Morgan, “Story” 106; Winkler, “Mendacity” 108). Charikleia’s attitude then seems to change; she agrees to marry Thyamis to buy time until the gods, apparently supervising their romance, work something out (1.26), as Kalasiris devised a remedy for an unwanted marriage earlier. Their despairing actions after Kalasiris’ passing recall Aeneas’ failure after Anchises’ death when he lingers with Dido. Only Mercury’s epiphany and his trip to the Underworld at his father’s behest can transform a backward-looking Trojan Aeneas into a forward-looking Roman Aeneas. During the night between Charikleia’s arrest and her trial, convinced that they were condemned to a “life without hope, an exile without end, and a fate without pity,” she had entered into a suicide pact with Theagenes “to accept voluntarily any death that might be inficted on them” (8.9). Charikleia is willing to abandon Theagenes rather than remain alive and offer to him what aid and comfort possible. This recalls the suicide attempts made by various heroes and heroines of the ideal novels. But it is a lapse, nevertheless. She has also shown a commitment to chastity by being willing to die for it. As in a martyrology, ascending the pyre Charikleia calls upon the various divinities (8.9.12) to testify to her innocence, which is followed by an epiphany of divine power, provoking the amazement of the crowd, who demand her release.83 Charikleia had denounced Arsake for stealing her husband, and now pyre’s fames surround Charikleia as if she were in a bridal chamber,84 fguring her marriage’s divinely sanctioned role. At this moment of her career’s demonic epiphany, her mother, through the admonition to keep the pantarbē stone always about her, has both saved her and prepared for her new understanding of her relationship to the divine, one earlier advanced by Kalasiris. Recall that the pantarbē stone was an engagement gift from Hydaspes to Persinna, a fgure for Hydaspes’ desire that nothing ever harm Persinna, and, paradoxically, it saves Charikleia from the grave threat that he himself represented as he forced her mother to expose their child to fortune’s winds. The main perfection lacking Charikleia is her uncertain faith in the divine process, and at this point, thanks to the miracle of the pantarbē

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stone, which fgures the good wishes of both father and mother, Charikleia begins to gain true possession of that faith. Afterward Arsake miscalculates, putting them in a cell together and enabling them “. . . to inspire in one another the courage to face with resolution and bravery whatever befell them, and not to finch from the struggle for their chastity and devotion” (8.9). They again debate whether their sufferings indicate baleful gods. Suddenly, Charikleia recalls a dream containing a message from Kalasiris about the pantarbē stone (8.11.3).85 Theagenes recounts his prophetic dream, likewise from Kalasiris, predicting that he would get to Ethiopia with a maiden and be freed tomorrow from his bonds. Both are verse oracles, suggesting Kalasiris has become an oracular presence who still tends them. Countering Theagenes’ more despairing interpretation, now Charikleia offers the more optimistic one, declaring: “Death seemed certain, but see! Here I am alive still. I carried my salvation with me, though I did not know it at the time; but now I think I understand” (8.11; my emphasis)—an understanding of the divine plan which she immediately connects to Kalasiris, “that most blessed of men.” She further assures Theagenes: “Take heart . . . we have a second pantarbe in the prophecy the gods have made us. So let us trust in the gods” (8.11).

Charikleia and the couple’s erotic maturation Although in a very different, more indirect, manner from D & C, the entire Aithiopika likewise concerns the development of the protagonists’ amatory relationship, one complicated by issues of identity, destiny, spirituality and wisdom. Erotic events largely motivate the plot, e.g., the initial copulation of Persinna and Hydaspes, Kalasiris’ self-exile from Memphis, the lust for Charikleia of Thyamis, Trachinus and Pelorus, Arsake’s passion for Theagenes and even Merebos’ desire to wed Charikleia (Anderson, “ΣΩΦΡΟΣΥΝΗ” 311–12). The lives of Knemon, Demainete, Thisbe, Thermouthis and even the unnamed friend of Nausikles, preoccupied with fnding a famingo for his lover, Isias of Chemmis, are motivated by love’s complications. Heliodorus and Apuleius embellish their hell-worlds with a compendium of narratives concerning perverted and degraded love that contrast with presentations of the amatory ideal. Thus, Knemon’s story contrasts with the love of the ideal couple and prefgures their struggles with Arsake.86 Heliodorus complicates the “love at frst sight” topos by making Demainete and Arsake also fall in love at frst sight and suffer, as Charikleia does, a debilitating love sickness. However, Charikleia’s sickness is tied up with her sense of shame, whereas Demainete and Arsake amorally surrender to a carnal passion. Oroondates is excited by the mere description of Charikleia (8.2), and even the austere Kalasiris exiles himself in part out of fear that he will succumb to Rhodopis’ allurements. Like other heroes/ heroines, Charikleia and Theagenes must also learn who they are in terms

176  Heliodorus’ Aithiopika of temperament, skills and values, as they negotiate a rather Platonic union amid earthly desires and hellish obstacles. As with the plot, we only gradually build up details of the protagonists’ evolving characters (Temmerman 257). As with Daphnis and Chloe, the love between Charikleia and Theagenes is spontaneous, mutual and reciprocal in emotions and action. That Charikleia and Theagenes are referred to as brother and sister (as Isis and Osiris were brother and sister as well as man and wife) suggests they enjoy the sort of nonsexual bond that Daphnis and Chloe had before Eros flew into the picture, which matures with time. Note how the protagonists are constantly associated with divine couples, such as Artemis and Apollo, Isis and Osiris and Selene and Helios, suggesting their fundamental connection on a personal and cosmic level.87 D & C displays how human sex involves matters of inequality and worse; likewise, the Aithiopika shows the dark power of sexual desire. Given this context, as Apuleius’ Metamorphoses suggests, only a strict devotion to virginity and proper sexual habitus, with proper theological and social foundations, can compensate for the release of threatening sexual forces. Sōphrosynē is important for other novelists,88 and Heliodorus has made sōphrosynē or the lack thereof a major feature in most of his characters’ lives.89 And as Chariton, Longus and especially Heliodorus show, proper sōphrosynē management, even in a more ideal world, must deal with the realities of that world, not entail a rigid conforming to norms. Sōphrosyne requires flexibility and resourcefulness in navigating conflicting moral duties, but it must avoid self-serving excess, the faults of Odysseus and Kalasiris (Papadimitropoulos). In her beauty and virtue, Charikleia incarnates the moral and religious ideal of late antiquity (Hani 268). The marvelous child Charikleia has built her life around being sōphrōn, and her great concern for chastity is the reverse image of the novel’s persistent fear of illegitimacy.90 Persinna, too, had this deep wisdom about chastity, whose commands, combined with Kalasiris’ guidance and Charikleia’s need to come to terms with her desire for Theagenes will, with some pain, refine what Charikleia believes about chastity. Sex is meant to be a metaphysical and social act (Whitmarsh, Narrative 112), making the couple’s love a sacramental hieros gamos, one needing a social justification similar to that which Daphnis discovered; note Charikleia declares that it is not “the depraving desire that ordinary people feel” that moves her (6.9.4). There is an echo of Christian contempt for the weakness of the body and almost a desire to endure torments to prove one’s spiritual worth, attitudes toward sex and the body seen in late antique Christian hagiographies and martyr acts. Sisimithres raised her for the first seven formative years of her life, which should qualify him as one of Charikleia’s pseudo-fathers. Note Charikleia’s joy when Charikleia realizes that Sismithres is present (10.11) it would not be surprising if her prolonged contact with Sisimithres the gymnosophist reinforced (or inspired) Charikleia’s idea of total devotion to the spiritual life. Her training at Delphi added to this

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orientation and prepared her for her falling in love with Theagenes, her true soulmate/soul brother. Charikleia is also a goddess-substitute, as implied in the early scene of the bandits discovering Charikleia tending Theagenes. Earlier (chronologically), the crafty Kalasiris told her to don the regalia of an Artemis priestess, having promised Pelorus that, if he went below deck to see Charikleia, he would see Artemis herself (5.28–33). Her costume, with its pronounced solar aspects (Lefteratou), makes the bandits wonder if she is divine, perhaps being Artemis or the local Isis, for they see her as beautiful, larger and more godlike (1.2.4). This scene is rich in the imagery of epiphany and aretalogy (Edsall 121–29; Mussies 8), and the bandits react like those present at an epiphany. Here, too, the image of Isis tending the dead or wounded Osiris is evoked91; one can also recall the image of Aphrodite tending the dying Adonis (especially as seen in Bion whom Heliodorus’ text echoes) as well as the Aphrodite lugens fgure type.92 Some think she is Artemis, perhaps tending a dying Hippolytus.93 The manner wherein Charikleia evokes the image of wife and goddess looks forward to her two fery epiphanies at Memphis (8.9.13) and Meroe (10.9.3).94 Telò also notes this scene’s resemblance to Philostratus’ depiction of Andromeda tending a wounded Perseus beside a body of water (Imag. 1.29),95 corresponding to Theagenes’ role as Perseus redux. As mentioned, Thyamis, unlike Agamemnon, seeks his fellow bandits’ permission to take Charikleia from the spoils. Apollo, offended, sent plague arrows among the Greeks; Trachinus and company not only take the quarrel of Agamemnon and Achilles to a more murderous level but here it is the insulted avatar of Artemis who sends the arrows, which resound in her quiver (1.2.5; cf. Hom. Il. 1.46–47), suggesting her demonic nature.96 Note how this early presentation of Charikleia evokes the chaste Artemis, the erotic Aphrodite/Ishtar and the wife Isis, corresponding to three contending aspects of her nature. The bandits (1.2.1), as well as Thyamis (1.20.1), see Charikleia’s eugeneia (nobility) and phronēmena (mental strength), factors connected to her intense focus on the retention of her purity and proper (not perpetual) virginity. Charikleia does not lack erotic passion. Rather her passion is both deeply spiritualized and controlled in expression, aiming for some ultimate sanction and transformation, but sometimes her control slips. Such frantic behaviors, too, are associated with a deity. Thus, to the third group of bandits (1.2.5), Charikleia acts as the raving priestess of some god who had caused the slaughter, almost certainly Dionysos; Heliodorus makes Dionysos, along with Helios and Selene, a major Ethiopian god.97 Similarly, we see “her hair tossing under a crown like a bacchant” (1.2.5). When she learns of the marriage of Knemon to Nausikleia, she is subject to a destructive, erotic frenzy, βακχεῖον (6.8.3 and 10.38.1), on which Kalasiris remarks (6.9). Frenzied, too, is Charikleia’s reunion with Theagenes at Memphis (7.7.5); and later she runs toward Charikles like a maenad (10.38.1). At Meroe, Helios and Selene have altars which accept purer, more orderly

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and more aristocratic sacrifces, but Dionysos’ altar, set apart, is less exclusive and will accept sacrifces of all kinds “in token, I presume, of his benevolence to all without distinction of class (10.7).” And over in Greece, for a third of the year, Delphi is given over to Dionysos. Looking forward, this ability to deal, unlike Euripides’ Pentheus with her Apollonian and substantial Dionysian side, and manage “maddened erōs and chaste sōphrosynē,”98 fts a ruler able to deal with the full range of human behaviors and classes. Note how in her dealings with Knemon she shows empathy (Grethlein 323). The love of Daphnis and Chloe, stage managed by Dionysos,99 brings about greater social unity; the steps leading to Charikleia’s marriage will also help unify the Ethiopian classes. Charikleia recalls Odysseus in her wanderings, her need to return home, the threats (erotic and otherwise) to her identity and her beggar’s dress. Odysseus as a cunning trickster connects to Charikleia as a skilled sophist and a quick-witted inventor of fction, skills honed by her experience with Kalasiris (Temmerman 264 ff.).100And as Kalasiris was her teacher in craft at Delphi, she is Theagenes’ teacher at Memphis (7.25), who soon creates clever plots as he manipulates Achaemenes (7.26.10). Charikleia learns to be more morally fexible, but also will be shown the limits of such sophistry, as her rhetorical strategy for convincing Hydaspes fails utterly. Further, Charikleia, like Oedipus, has her adventure motivated in part by an oracle from Apollo (2.35.5) and has a desperate need to know the full scandal of her birth, knowledge which becomes a life-or-death issue.101 Charikleia and Oedipus are children who should not be, all parts of the divine plan, both exiled due to fathers who threaten them with death. But whereas in the Oedipus’ story the gaining of self-knowledge is accompanied by a fatal rupture with his parents, a ruined royal house and a wrecked Thebes, Charikleia’s gaining of self-knowledge is tied to the restoration of her family, the healing of past evils and a renewal of the Meroitic state. There is a close equation between Charicleia and the Heliodorus’ Nile, which is real, symbolic and divine (9.9.3), which organizes the novel’s action102 and whose sources are a mystery103 that even Apollonius of Tyana failed to solve.104 While the quasi-huckster Kalasiris seems willing to make defnite statements about the Nile’s sources (2.28.2), Hydaspes only declares that they are in Ethiopia (9.22.7; Elmer 436). Meroe is not really the Nile’s point of origin either, but rather where three rivers converge to become the Nile; note how at the end appear three fgures, Charikleia’s biological mother, father and the painting, seemingly contributors to Charikleia’s coming-into-being, but her real origin lies in the long-term workings of the divine. The Nile’s mysteries involve its quasi-erotic relationship with the land (Whitmarsh, Narrative 131), and Charikleia’s somewhat mysterious erotic career involves her relationship with Theagenes. At Delphi, Kalasiris sees her mental strength warring with her passion for Theagenes (4.9.3), which she views as a disgrace to her virginity, something she should have overcome (4.10.2, 4.10.3 and 4.11.1), as well as a violation

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of Charikles’ word of the father. Before the revelation of the tania, Kalasiris, Charikleia’s spiritual guide, helps her reformulate what exactly she is ashamed about, that is sexual desire, not marriage (4.10.5–6). He makes her understand that one can show through devotion to one’s amatory partner within the married state. Thus, Kalasiris prepares for and complements Persinna’s message, which makes Charikleia understand how her noble ancestry connects to the need to maintain chastity, but also to her social duties—which imply marriage (Temmerman 251–57)— motivating a change in her attitude toward sexuality and passion. Charikleia’s eugeneia is aligned with her phronēma (Temmerman 252). Thus, as soon as she learns her true origins, Charikleia displays “a pride suited more to her origins” (4.12.1), which propels her through later trials. From this point forward, Charikleia sees herself, in some sense, as married to Theagenes. Just as Daphnis needs the sanction of society and marriage to have sex and somewhat subordinate Chloe, so Charikleia needs the sanction of her mother, her society and the divine plan (as well as her further suffering) to sanction her marriage to Theagenes. She recalls sōphrosynē who must somehow maintain her sōphrosynē under conditions she once thought abhorrent. Charikleia is profoundly passionate and wages an intense battle between strong desires (for love and rest) and the sense of the universe’s hostility and the futility of her hopes. This battle continues until the last moment when, despite her sophistic skills, she has trouble communicating with Persinna about erotic matters.

Novella of Persinna In our novels, children are burdened by the often oppressive word(s) of the father(s) which they modify or overturn; so are mothers. Persinna is a mater dolorosa; recall Demeter’s daughter Persephone is carried away, due to her father, to the Deadlands, and how the mourning Demeter strives to get her back. For me, Meroe’s greatness shines out more in Persinna than in Hydaspes or Sisimithres. Hydaspes partly embodies the baleful word of the father, whose view of female sexuality provokes fear; as Sisimithres notes, Hydaspes stubbornly insists on obeying ancestral laws concerning human sacrifce (of his own child!) even after the gods have rejected such sacrifce. Kalasiris, seeking to see the tania,105 said it might contain a harmful magic charm. In fact, the tania IS like a magic charm, which maps out Charikleia’s sacred tale, describing her unique origins, her ultimate destination and her physical and moral quests (Anderson, “ΣΩΦΡΟΣΥΝΗ” 309). Persinna understands that, if Charikleia is ever to fnd her home, she will endure travels, adventures and tests (all threats to her physical and moral virginity); thus, Persinna’s admonition to virginity comes right after her command that Charikleia keeps the pantarbē stone always with her (4.8), which later preserves her at Memphis. The tania is a vivid testimony to Persinna’s deep pain and trial, and she sees her writing as a kind of dirge for the death of a child she exposed, giving it into the hands of fate, not directly to

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Sisimithres—adding to the episode’s underworld tones (4.8.1). The band’s message also demonstrates Persinna’s painful and conficted struggle to retain both the appearance of sōphrosynē and its inner reality106 and anticipates the coming trial at Meroe, where Persinna will be vindicated (Morgan, “Narrative Doublets” 65 ff.). What gives Charikleia permission to defy Charikles and to elope with Theagenes is that powerful word of the mother, Persinna (Anderson, “ΣΩΦΡΟΣΥΝΗ” 312), then combined with the Word of Kalasiris, Charikleia’s soul-father.107 But that writing was a prelude to long sufferings. Persinna had exposed the child, “her fate entrusted to the uncertainties of Fortune,” and Sisimithres took it up, fearing that it might die (2.31). Sisimithres knew the child’s origins (he was going to tell Charikles), but there is no indication at the conclusion that Persinna knows either Kalasiris or that Charikleia, ten years earlier, had grown up in good health before being given to an elite Greek, which would give Charikleia good chances for survival. But instead, Persinna has suffered in unknowing silence for sixteen years, all hopes nearly extinguished, which explains why she, like Hydaspes, ignores the divine dream of a daughter and later falls into “forlorn silence” when the tania is produced (10.13.1). The Meroitic conclusion vindicates Persinna before the world (against Hydaspes) and is a prelude to longer years of joy.

The novella of Theagenes Another ideal novella concerns Theagenes, whose complicated character development connects to Achilles, to Odysseus and to Charikleia’s Meroitic destiny. In Theagenes, one sees a fusion of the “comic” hero, the “philosophical” hero (Odysseus), the “tragic” hero (Achilles) and the “world-historical” hero (Perseus). Theagenes is repeatedly displayed as a Homeric hero, and he behaves heroically; for example, during the beach battle, he cuts off Pelorus’ arm, and later he is asked by Thyamis to become a rebel commander in case of his death (7.5.5).108 At Meroe, his wrestling the bull and then the Ethiopian giant illustrate his Greco-Thessalian excellences. Theagenes will also be a second Perseus who rescues, then marries a second Andromeda and refounds a nation, becoming a virtual Ethiopian. Theagenes imagines himself as a second Achilles, and the elaborate genealogy he gives suggests the constructed nature of his performance, his Ainians being proverbial for their obscurity, and by the classical period mere “wandering names.”109 Further, Thessalians had a reputation for dishonesty, and the Thessalians and Ainians were said to have been Medizers who later helped Brennos invade Delphi (Hilton, “Cult”). Nevertheless, Theagenes’ genealogy makes them the essence of Greekness,110 although Kalasiris (quite a mythologizer of origins himself) is skeptical. Identities can be archetypal; Kalasiris marvels at Theagenes, noting something redolent of Achilles (2.34). Plato notes how real-world objects recall their archetypes; accordingly, Theagenes’ Achilles-like behavior can be seen as self-fashioning in conformity with

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a preexisting paradigm, which builds upon Theagenes being Charikleia’s true soulmate/soul brother though a Platonically infexed notion of preexistence and the repetition of primordial patterns, all connecting Charikleia to her truer spiritual purpose, as does their reproduction of the Perseus– Andromeda story. Further, Theagenes’ career gives a happier ending to the story of Achilles and Neoptolemus. Odysseus and Achilles pose different models for heroism, with Odysseus, whose trickery took Troy and died peacefully, the apparent winner, while Achilles and Neoptolemus both perished young in part due to Apollo’s wrath and their own excesses. Odysseus tries to make peace with Achilles, who regrets his premature death (Hom. Od. 11.465–540). The only thing that cheers Achilles up is learning that Neoptolemus has shown proper heroic behavior, but soon Neoptolemus will be murdered at Delphi, now atoned for by the ritual Charikleia and Theagenes participate in.111 Earlier traditions often display Neoptolemus as being aggressive at Delphi, in line with his murder of Priam and Polyxena. In Euripides later Andromeda, Neoptolemus does not come off too well either, but there Orestes is his murderer, with Apollo’s help. But here in Theagenes, Achilles’ direct descendant, Achilles can claim success, and even a type of reconciliation with Apollo.112 While Odysseus’ triumph in the minor state of Ithaka involves his remaining home, Theagenes’ more important (from the world-historical perspective) achievement involves him embracing the alienness that Odysseus fed. To preserve his Greek and personal identity, Odysseus must avoid permanent entanglement with Eastern women (Circe, Calypso and Nausicaä); but Theagenes fnds his true calling through his marriage with the very exotic easterner Charikleia, becoming at the end symbolically black (Morgan, “Sense” 318). And this Greek embrace of Eastern alienness may have a deeper antecedent. Charikleia is known for her unusually bright eyes (2.16.3), and Medea, of the Sun’s race, has similar eyes by which Circe recognizes her (Ap. Rhod. Argon. 4.725–29). Thus, Heliodorus also produces a kind of an Eastern-positive inversion of the Medea myth, where an Eastern princess of considerable aptitude brings a male Greek to be her consort in the East, a union that proves far more successful than of Jason and Medea.113 But like Charikleia, Theagenes will also develop a deeper, more fexible ability to deal with the world by adopting traits associated with Odysseus. Like Habrocomes, Theagenes starts out acting arrogantly and behaving impulsively, but is shown to have a sweetness that softens his pride, and Kalasiris helps him tone down his rashness. The fact that Theagenes has the same scar as Odysseus on his knee (5.5.2), which I see as part of the setup for his failed recognition of Charikleia at Memphis, also gives a link to Odysseus. Thus, Theagenes, to abduct Charikleia, adopts Odyssean traits (4.5.5). Sophocles’ Ajax shows how Teucer mediates between the infexible, doomed Ajax and Odysseus. Theagenes does something similar. Theagenes has a special reason to distrust Odyssean subterfuge; recall Hom. Il. 9.308–13. As noted, Charikleia imparts to Theagenes her skills of deception (7.25). Thus,

182 Heliodorus’ Aithiopika Theagenes later manages to manipulate Achaemenes (7.26.10). Although he wonders why Charikleia refuses to immediately identify herself to Hydaspes (9.24), at Meroe Theagenes later claims that Charikleia is his sister and then confuses Hydaspes with claims that Charikleia is already married (10.33)! Charikleia motivates Theagenes to become a better, but somewhat different, self. Like Xenophon’s Habrocomes, his model, Theagenes had contempt for women and sex before he met Charikleia (3.17.4). He does not reject love on any deep spiritual grounds, and when he recognizes love’s power, he relents (Temmerman 253–54). He often frames in Stoic terms his freedom of will to withstand temptation and torture.114 Note how, when kissing, embracing Charikleia tightly, she admonished him when he becomes aroused (5.4.5), which Charikleia says has happened often (1.25.4). Unlike Kleitophon, who protests at a similar occasion, Theagenes restrains himself, “for though he was the slave of love, he was the master of pleasure” (5.4.5), indicating his devotion to eros as a spiritual and moral force, not as a mere appetite. Later, when Theagenes is being tortured, Heliodorus declares that “he was more of a man than ever . . . [t]hough his body was in torment, his spirit had the strength of virtue” and that Fortune has shown him a kindness “by presenting him an opportunity to display his love and devotion to Charikleia” (8.6.4). Indeed, like a Christian martyr, he and Charikleia seem to almost take a certain delight in being tormented to prove their virtue (Doulamis 156). Charikleia and Theagenes are perhaps the most equal couple of the extant ideal novels. Each shows confdence, bravery and daring. Theagenes is no mere appendage to Charikleia; remember it is Perseus who saves Andromeda, whose willingness to undertake a quest into an unknown (and thus perhaps dangerous) land makes her rescue and its aftermath possible. Consider how the painting shows Andromeda at the moment after Perseus has liberated her from her chains; it is the desire for a marriage to Theagenes which makes Charikleia undertake the quest to fnd her true identity. Theagenes will take a somewhat subsidiary position to Charikleia as, in the end, Chloe must be subsidiary to Daphnis, although being priest of the Sun (and one assumes eventual king of Ethiopia) will give him vast responsibilities. Telò connects Heliodorus’ initial tableaux of dead and dying pirates and Odysseus glancing eagle-eyed over the dead and dying suitors (Hom. Od. 22.381–89). While this allusion is certainly there, I suggest a more natural comparison is with the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs, one of the “greatest hits” of Greek literature and art. Recall how Nestor tells of the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs (Hom. Il.1.247–84; also Ov. Met.12.210–535); scenes from this battle are common in Greek temple art.115 In Kalasiris’ description of Neoptolemus’ procession, which helps defne the mythic nature of Charikleia’s and Theagenes’ relationship, Theagenes wears a cloak embroidered with a depiction of the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs (3.3.5). While Pirithoos comes from Larissa, Theagenes hails from nearby Hypata. Bartsch connects this depiction to how Theagenes will wrestle a bull so

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closely that his horse and the bull will seem to merge into one (Decoding 148). Thus, Theagenes, on his wedding day (as the fght with the Centaurs occurred on Pirithoos’ wedding day, so the banquet battle occurs on Trachinus’ planned wedding day), seems to be wrestling with a hippotaur. I do not deny a possible Odyssey allusion, but, considering Heliodorus’ polysemantic tendencies, this hardly precludes linking the Lapiths and Centaurs to the beach battle and its symbolic meanings, and, as a battle between pirates over a woman, it is closer to what happens than Odysseus’ battle with the suitors. And the second item Theagenes is wearing, an amber clasp with Medusa’s head, further underscores the proleptic nature of his costume. But this is not the fearsome Gorgon such as seen on Agamemnon’s shield (Hom. Il. 11.36), but may represent an intense attraction for the “gorgeous” beauty of the beloved (Whitmarsh, “Written” 120). Theagenes’ embroidered cloak is predictive, for he will battle over Charikleia with virtual Centaurs,116 who traditionally (with some exceptions) are prone to sexual violence and often serve as disruptors of marriage (duBois 27–28). In Book 10, a confict with such bestial forces is fgured by his wrestling with a bull and the huge wrestler who challenged the Ethiopian commons. But before this conclusion, Theagenes will fail at Memphis and need further proving, which Arsake’s torments provide. During their travels, Theagenes and Charikleia decide on recognition tokens (5.5), connecting with how their travels through Egypt’s virtual underworld threatens their identity. Now, platonically speaking, there should be a close relationship between the vision of beauty and love. When her love enables the rag-clad Charikleia to see Theagenes from afar, stung into passion, she rushes to him like a madwoman. Yet Theagenes, repelled, cuffs her (7.6). Earlier they thought that just by looking they would be able to recognize each other (5.5.20), as had happened earlier during their moment of falling in love (3.5.4–5). Knemon doubted that the beggar’s disguise would work, imagining how their beauty would stand out (2.19). Perhaps Theagenes, due to class prejudice, cannot imagine Charikleia so dressed, as happens with Kleitophon during a similar scene in Achilles Tatius (5.16; Montiglio, Love 121). Xenophon of Ephesus, Heliodorus’ model, provides an explanation for Theagenes’ distraction. For a while, Habrocomes, then part of Hippothoos’ bandit company, seems to forget his search for Anthia. But then, hearing a rumor of her, he leaves (3.10). We saw earlier how Thyamis, displaced from his proper station as a priest of Isis, became a murderous bandit. Later, right before his battle with his brother, Thyamis asks Theagenes, if he should die, to lead “these men of Bessa who are devoted to you” (7.5).117 Theagenes apparently agrees to this; note how they tearfully embrace as Thyamis leaves to fght. Theagenes’ membership in Thyamis’ band has detached him from his true purpose, and he can no longer see with Platonic vision. Just as Thisbe represents what Charikleia might have become, so Thyamis shows what Theagenes might have become. But after the beaten Charikleia whispers: “O Pythian, have you forgotten the torch?”—he perceives her gaze like a shaft of sunlight

184 Heliodorus’ Aithiopika shining out between the clouds and recognizes her (7.7). As Telemachus cannot initially recognize Odysseus, Kalasiris’ sons cannot recognize Kalasiris (and remain hesitant for a while), Penelope cannot recognize Odysseus and Theagenes cannot recognize Charikleia—all foreshadow Hydaspes’ problems recognizing Charikleia. Theagenes will later prove his loyalty to Charikleia in his unwavering resistance to Arsake and trust in her desire to choose death while he still lives. Novella of Kalasiris For Paulsen, the story of Kalasiris provides a counterpoint to the parallel stories of Charikleia and Theagenes (also Montiglio, Love 123, n. 177). Kalasiris is the novel’s richest character (Billault, “Holy Man” 122), having fve hypostases: (1) The archetypal magical helper in the protagonists’ quest, becoming also a kind of foster father, serving too as the useful, tricky slave; (2) manifesting an idealized image of a Pythagorean/Theosophic theios anēr; (3) as an Odyssean and Egyptian trickster,118 a problematical holy man, recalling fgures like Peregrinus Proteus and Nectanebus of the Alexander Romance;119 (4) as a narrator second only to Heliodorus himself, a kind of novelistic (and Odyssean) alter ego;120 (5) as a character with his own considerable subplot involving his fall and restoration though performing his divinely assigned role in the plan to return Charikleia with Theagenes to Meroe. Priests take a more pronounced role in the Aithiopika than in other Greek ideal novels. Four of the central characters are priests or become priests (Kalasiris, Charikles and Sisimithres) and the protagonists will become priests and priestesses. Kalasiris is given immediate lodging and support at Delphi—and the support of Delphi’s god (2.27).121 While Kalasiris is technically an Isis priest, nothing associates him closely with Isis or any particular god, ftting later antique notions of all gods being representations of a single divinity. Kalasiris characterizes Delphi as a pious philosophic retreat, and Apollo’s oracle is effective. But its priest, Charikles, while being a learned man who even toured Egypt to gain knowledge, seems something of a pendant and, for the priest of a god of prophecy, pretty weak at interpreting oracles. He asks Kalasiris to use Egyptian magic on his daughter, a considerable moral lapse. As he worries about his daughter’s marriage, he recalls the gullible father of New Comedy. The Aithiopika presents a hierarchy of spiritual knowledge with Greece at the bottom, then Egypt, followed by Ethiopia, most perfect of all, three stops on Charikleia’s spiritual pursuit (Whitmarsh, “Writes” 24; also Szepessy). As the witch of Bessa demonstrates, as well as Kalasiris himself, Egyptian learning is formidable, and its wisdom goes beyond Greece’s more straightforward rationalism to uncover all manner of hidden and mystic meanings, as does Kalasiris’ Egyptian Homer (Dowden, “Heliodoros” 281–82). Kalasiris’ distinction between high and low magic (3.16)122 is an

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ideal expression of his moral universe (6.14–15). Likewise, the solar/celestial religion of Meroe and of Sisimithres’ gymnosophists can be viewed in part as Heliodorus’ imaginative dream of a more effective religion. Nevertheless, Egyptian practice lacks proper respect for conventional morals, chastity and thus for internal and spiritual purity, which some Greeks excel at and the Ethiopians even more so. As Egypt’s wisdom increased its power, it seemed to have fallen prey, like Nectanebus, to the “dark side.” Thus, the virgin Greek Theagenes is a better candidate for adding something positive to Meroitic culture than are Egyptians like Kalasiris. Heliodorus’ Kalasiris is an identifable type of priest seen in Greek and later Egyptian literature, more a prophētēs, resembling the Greek Neoplatonic/Pythagorean philosopher/sage (Morgan, “History,” 250; Sandy, “Characterization” 154), than an Egyptian priest, known for their shaven heads.123 He also corresponds (imperfectly) to the theios anēr.124 Kalasiris is attracted to Delphi mainly as a retreat for philosophers (2.26). Kalasiris often works, as did various problematical late antique holy men, sophists and doctors, though his powers of deduction and observation (Kim, “Trouble”; Dowden, “Heliodoros” 283–84), which allowed him to hoodwink the less observant; Kalasiris indeed takes a certain pride in his ability to control others.125 Further, according Antisthenes’ scholium on Hom. Od. 1.50–63, Pythagoras, likewise much traveled, modeled himself on Homer’s Odysseus and his ability to craft his speech to the nature of the person (Mota 108–09). Kalasiris’ allegorizing of Homer was common among later Neopythagoreans and (Neo)Platonists, such as Proclus. Yet the text gives enough evidence for Kalasiris’ effective action and understanding of the divine plan so that, by the rules of the textual world, we must see Kalasiris as a true (if somewhat lapsed) holy man possessing special wisdom and authority—despite his evident playing fast and loose with normal realities (Dowden, “Heliodoros” 284). Kalasiris’ great drama tells how, after tragedy, exile and its implied disgrace, and despite the faws of his own personality, he becomes an effective prophētēs despite himself, as proven in his loving care for the couple, their own reciprocal love, his peaceful death and the postmortem assistance he gives. The Kalasiris novella has two parts. The frst part ends with the conclusion of his narrative to Knemon (5.33.3), which describes the causes of his exile, his movement to Delphi, and the discovery that he has been divinely selected to restore Charikleia to Meroe. Kalasiris through this narrative enacts his discovery of the purpose he will serve,126 a way for him to process what has happened at this critical stage of life (Winkler, “Mendacity”), for soon he will go to Memphis and die. His maior opus then begins; the reader (and Kalasiris) now knows what happened before the opening scene; what happens next is unknown. Kalasiris’ story does not end with his death and fnal reward; Charikleia and Theagenes are his spiritual children, and his fnal success and their fnal judgment on him depend upon their fates. This story of his second chance after family tragedy begins with his unexpected

186 Heliodorus’ Aithiopika reception by the god at Delphi.127 For Kalasiris, Delphi is a philosopher’s retreat where, after disaster, he can fgure out where his life stands. Apollo’s exceptional oracle had predicted he would be led back to Egypt, implying his future involvement with the divine machinery. This oracle would make Kalasiris sensitive to further clues. It cannot be an authorial accident that, while answering questions at Delphi about the Nile and its origins (recall the Nile’s mystery is equated with Charikleia’s mystery), Kalasiris is approached by Charikles (2.29), who shares with Kalasiris family tragedy and self-imposed exile and from whom he learns something of Charikleia’s uncanny history. The next clue arrives when the god gives an oracle to the Delphians about the protagonists. Kalasiris perceives quickly the signifcance of their names. He subsequently notices their falling in love at frst sight (3.5) and later observes Theagenes’ evident lovesickness. A dream vision of Apollo and Artemis complements his own earlier oracle, telling him that it was time for him to return to Memphis and commending Charikleia and Theagenes to him as his children as well as his partners in his coming journey (3.11). Note that the oracle’s fnal phrase, “[f]rom Egypt conduct them onward wherever and however it please the gods,” accommodates the fact that Kalasiris will lead them out of Egypt only post mortem. Kalasiris seems to think it his responsibility to guide the couple somewhere (4.4), but that is NOT what Apollo and Artemis told him to do, for they (presumably) knew he would be dead. Kalasiris does know, based on the oracle, that they must go somewhere, but where? It is not until he reads the tania (4.4) that he learns that Charikleia must return to Ethiopia. This is his chief moment of enlightenment, when, with great compassion for all involved, he recognizes the vast machinery he is involved in and the steep task ahead: “On reading this, Knemon, I perceived the hand of the gods and marveled at the subtlety of their governance. . . . My heart . . . was sorely troubled about the course the future might take…” (4.9). The dream oracle of Apollo and Artemis prompts many solutions. Kalasiris needs to get to Egypt to be given his reworked Oedipus-and-Odysseus ending, stopping his sons from killing each other, dying peacefully in his family’s company and becoming a necromantic oracle. Apollo and Artemis commend the protagonists to him as their father; it is Kalasiris’ choice to take upon himself that greater responsibility of learning where they are to go, also logically necessary—after all, could he convince them to go to Memphis without knowing where they would go from there? This connects with noted duplicities in his story to Knemon. At one point, Kalasiris pauses his backstory for a moment until he had “achieved the exalted state of mind appropriate to the contemplation of holy mysteries” (4.13). Kalasiris then discloses that Homer was really an Egyptian, often thought something not to be taken seriously (Whitmarsh, “Birth” 106). Here the wondrous story of Homer connects to the marvelous story of Charikleia, a higher mystery. Kalasiris now knows that the Gods want to conduct him home and have enabled him as a spiritual father to assist Theagenes and

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Charikleia, tying their journeys together. Thus, he may well have had an intense dream which he did take for a real omen; accordingly, his play acting and discourse on deity detection fgures his belief the gods did in fact communicate (however obscurely) to him. But since this dream, however inspired, was in fact generated by his own mind, Apollo and Artemis could not tell him where to take the protagonists, for he did not know. What is more, even as he relates this dream to Knemon, he still does not know he will not conduct the couple past Memphis. Further, the Homeric text seems Egyptian in its ability to be reinterpreted at many levels, and there is no utterly fxed tradition of Homer’s birthplace, so why not in Egypt? A text with such multiple meanings should be the product of an experienced person who has lived a life of wanderings, marvels and suffering and thus realizes that reality is never monovalent. The fact that Homer’s writings have this density of meaning suggests that Homer must have had such a life, and thus something like what happened to Charikleia (being touched by the divine, scandalous birth, exile and wandering) and what happened to Kalasiris himself (being touched by the divine, scandal, exile and wandering) must have happened to Homer (Whitmarsh, Narrative 114). And since names are signifcant, and there have been other famous thigh puns, such as regarding Dionysos (Eur. Bacch. 295–97), he can use the allegorizing method to craft a story somewhat similar to which he can imagine happened to Homer! Kalasiris’ creation of truth-like stories can explain another major interpretive crux—Kalasiris’ claim to have been commissioned by Persinna to fnd Charikleia (4.12). I favor Baumbach’s view that Kalasiris fabricates this story, for I think Kalasiris’ narrative shows he did not know about Persinna and Charikleia before coming to Delphi.128 Note Kalasiris declares to Knemon that the events between his departure from Memphis and his arrival in Delphi were not of great importance (when he supposedly talked with Persinna) and that Persinna was not the main reason he went to Delphi. At Meroe, Persinna seems to know nothing about Kalasiris, whose earlier fction presumes that Persinna had learned from Sisimithres that Charikleia was in Delphi, but there is no indication that Sisimithres told Persinna about his dealings with Charikleia. Further, Kalasiris understood the Delphic oracle concerning the protagonists’ destination no better than the general crowd. I posit that Kalasiris’ subsequent story to Charikleia about his mission from Persinna is sort of a poetic interpretation of what subsequently happened, somewhat like his prior dream of Apollo and Artemis. Kalasiris realizes that he has been part of the gods’ workings, and he is connected to Persinna’s hopes for her daughter, although not directly. In other words, he realizes that Persinna was prompted (unawares) to write the band as a future message to Kalasiris, who, in his assigned role in the divine plan, would begin the process of returning Charikleia home. So, in a sense, Persinna anticipated Kalasiris’ activity, and so his mission was given to him by Persinna, although she was not aware of it.

188 Heliodorus’ Aithiopika A similar bit of fable-making happens later. Kalasiris reports (5.22) a dream in which an aged Odysseus appeared to him, berated him for not visiting him and predicted that he would suffer similar trials on land and sea. He also reported Penelope’s commendation to Charikleia regarding virginity (Hunter, “Homer” 251). Here, the elderly Odysseus looks more like Kalasiris, who also had made major mistakes that nearly ruined his family and who needed a second chance, which he got in part through divine interventions. But this Odysseus’ thigh is vigorous, and we recall how Kalasiris’ Homer, too, had a special thigh. A plausible implication; Kalasiris sees himself as almost used up (he will be dead soon), but still has powers that can help him complete his mission. The fact that Penelope commends Charikleia’s virginity refects a popular view of Penelope in later antiquity, but also Kalasiris’ understanding of the nexus between Charikleia’s virginity and spirituality. Indeed, as noted, Kalasiris was essential in helping Charikleia come to terms with her erotic condition and her desire for both sōphrosynē and marriage. Kalasiris’ redemption aligns with faults he shares with Oedipus and Odysseus, and his narrative accounts for much of the Odyssey favor of the work (Elmer 414). The long tale of Kalasiris to Knemon reproduces the Phaeacian tales, with the palace of the seafaring Phaeacians replaced by that of the merchant Nausikles, with Nausikleia recalling Nausicaä. Both sets of stories provide a summing up before the main narrative of homecoming can begin, but Kalasiris, who cannot see the full aftermath of his complicated story, is not its best judge. The wanderings and sufferings of Odysseus are linked to his shortcomings as well as to Odysseus’ advantages, features also true of Kalasiris. Odysseus’ cleverness allows him to get the Trojan mission accomplished in a way the more rigid Achilles or Ajax cannot. But note how the guilt of Odysseus hangs over the Odyssey, beginning with the implicit question: If he was a good leader, why did he lose all his men? We see how his decision to meet the Cyclops and then taunt him when blinded had terrible consequences. We observe his guilt and attempt to reconcile with Ajax, his sorrow for the lost time apart from his son and his tears for Argos. A persistent myth pattern is a person’s exile as the result of something gone terribly wrong, with the exile continuing until there is a kind of resolution or atonement. We see this in the wanderings of Oedipus, Hercules and, of course, Odysseus. We see this to a certain extent in the wanderings of Charikles, and, of course, Kalasiris. Thus, Odysseus must learn to hide himself as a beggar, and he fnally gains that less egoistic perspective where he can forbid Eurykleia to boast over slain suitors. Tiresias predicts that Odysseus, reconciled to Poseidon, that is, with the divine order, will, surrounded by his family, die peacefully. The Odyssey describes how Odysseus loses his identity and regains it, but also how Odysseus helps Telemachus gain his heroic identity as preparation for his eventual rule of Ithaka. And thus, in a sense, Charikleia is a Telemachus to Kalasiris’ Odysseus, with Persinna the persecuted Penelope that both of them must assist.

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Here, Heliodorus presents an Odysseus (with Oedipus elements) who is, in a sense, rehabilitated and rewarded for serving a larger purpose. Kalasiris also is like an Oedipus who fees his home in an attempt to avoid a certain destiny (seeing his children fght; Morgan, “Heliodorus” 438) as well as due to sexual scandal, but instead of cursing his sons (see Oedipus at Colonus), he keeps them from mutual slaughter; both are fated to die in an uncanny manner and have post mortem infuence, seen in the oracular dreams that Charikleia and Theagenes receive. The signifcance of Kalasiris’ peaceful death has not been suffciently recognized. Note how the temple attendant at Memphis says: “he should be conducted to his grave with rejoicings and blessings, for having entered upon a better estate and joined heaven’s elect” (7.11.9). Kalasiris recalls Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus (Whitmarsh, Narrative 112–13) who, toward the end of his life, has come to understand his role in the divine plan. Having served this purpose, Kalasiris is allowed the peaceful end which was promised to Odysseus. Although Charikleia can see through his playacting, she continues to think of him as the holiest of men (4.5.4). Their litany of how central Kalasiris was to them and the testimony to his nobility which Theagenes and Charikleia make upon his death (7.10) gives further proof of how we should evaluate him. As described above, like Oedipus, Kalasiris continues to help beyond the grave, as his post mortem oracles to Charikleia and Theagenes show. Kalasiris claimed that earlier, after his wife died, the courtesan Rhodopis arrived, and he thought, with support from astrology,129 that he might not resist her sexual advances and thus exiled himself. The notion of a disrupted and hostile cosmic order is fgured by how Odysseus’ wanderings are caused by the anger of Poseidon, with whom he will be reconciled by doing service to the god. A useful comparandum is found in the vastly older Egyptian narrative, the story of Sinuhe, dated around 1875 BCE. The courtier Sinuhe “son of the Sycamore,”130 after the death of Amenemhet I, overhears a conversation that flls him with such inexplicable fear that he exiles himself from Egypt, going to the barbarian land of Canaan. As with Kalasiris, the precise reason Sinuhe left Egypt is rather unclear, except that the cosmic order is disturbed and he feels he is in danger and must earn his return. Sinuhe earns that return by accomplishing great deeds whose fame reaches Egypt, whose new pharaoh, possessing divine status, summons him back. There is an emphasis on Sinuhe having his eternal home and a proper death in Egypt. The Nectanebus episodes from the Alexander Romance suggest other comparisons. Nectanebus, like Kalasiris, is an expert in Egyptian magical wisdom,131 but recognizing that the order of heaven is against him, he fees Egypt. By going to Pella and engaging in some world-class divine (and sexual) deception, he literally births the career of the marvelous child Alexander, a fgure of world-historical importance, although he dies, like Kalasiris, before the marvelous child can fulfll his destiny. In the Alexander Romance tradition, Alexander does not resemble his father or his mother but is said

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to be his own type (Ps.-Callisth. 1.13),132 as is Charikleia (Heliod. 10.7.3). In a sense, the cosmic order sends Nectanebus out of Egypt to be the means by which Alexander will come into his evident cosmic destiny. The Odyssey and the Story of Sinuhe stress themes of homecoming; in the Alexander Romance, when Nectanebus disappears, the Egyptians get an oracle that he will return (Ps.-Callisth. 1.3)—and he does in the person of Alexander. Thus, as in the case of Sinuhe and Nectanebus, a form of cosmic disorder and opposition forces Kalasiris to leave Egypt for Delphi, where he becomes part of the workings of the divine machinery to launch Charikleia on her quest to fulfll her true (and world-historical) destiny. The trickiness of Kalasiris and Nectanebus make them fne tools for the divine machinery’s employment. In the end, having served his function and thus reconciled to the divine machinery, as Oedipus was reconciled, Kalasiris dies peacefully with order restored among his family, as Odysseus restored his own household. He then is buried in his native land, as Odysseus and Sinuhe are. As Heliodorus makes a distinction between fesh and spirit, there is a distinction between the biological family and the spiritual family; Charikleia, Theagenes and Kalasiris seem to belong to a spiritual family perhaps tied to their possible Platonic preexistence. Artemis and Apollo commanded Kalasiris to take care of them as if they were his children (3.11.5), and Kalasiris considers them his “unmothered children” (2.23.2). This clearly echoes the Symposium and Diotima’s notion of birth through the soul.133 Theagenes says Kalasiris was considered their father and really was (7.13.1).134 Charikleia likewise calls him, after his death, “father, the best of names” (7.14). Her dream that she lost an eye may also relate to Kalasiris’ death (2.16.1).135 It is Kalasiris who frst creates the ploy that they are his children, thus brother and sister.136 Charikleia uses this ruse with Thyamis, her statement of their dual role as a priestess of Isis and priest of Apollo (1.22) prefguring their fnal roles at Meroe. When they are separated from Kalasiris, they continue the ruse. The Odyssey tries, without much success, to show Telemachus a ftting successor to Odysseus. Note how Odysseus is upset when Telemachus seems unwilling to protect the stranger, the disguised Odysseus (16.70–72). Kalasiris, too, is a father who leads his children to their greatest challenge, as Anchises (lamed through his own scandal with Aphrodite) dies right before Aeneas meets Dido, making Charikleia and Theagenes children who, in a sense, must redeem and surpass their problematical spiritual parent.

Arisen from the pyre: the Aithiopika’s ending The ending of the Aithiopika ties together numerous threads of the myth of Charikleia the recreatrix, particularly: (1) The reformation of the polity of Meroe, both in terms of ending the practice of human sacrifce and giving a greater role to the gymnosophists; (2) the enlightenment of Hydaspes; (3) Charikleia’s assumption of her proper sacropolitical status, as well as her fnal negotiation between the demands of eros and sōphrosynē; (4) the

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establishment of Theagenes’ own sacropolitical status, including becoming “Ethiopian”; and (5) a closure based on a vindication of the divine, mysteriosophic power-controlling events. As noted, the night spent in the cell together (8.10–11) and the revelation of Kalasiris’ postmortem oracles present a turn upward toward the fnal resolution. After Kalasiris’ oracle that they would soon be freed of Arsake’s chains proves true, Theagenes suggests that they allow themselves to be captured by the scouts (8.16.7), as a fulfllment of his dream oracle. Charikleia becomes even more certain that they are in destiny’s hands (8.17.1). Note this authorial directive: The scene was like the preliminary appearance and introduction of the actors in the theater before the play begins . . . [who] were now not so much led as escorted in captive state, guarded by those who were soon to be their subjects. Such was the position of Theagenes and Charikleia. (8.17) This recalls the beginning of Book 8 of Callirhoe, which guarantees the novel’s happy ending. The ups and downs of the fnal scenes do not suggest the happy ending might be short-circuited; it is rather like watching James Bond being constantly placed in inescapable dangers and wondering just how he will survive this time. But these passages continue to present the protagonists’ own personal uncertainty seen since the novel’s beginning. Soon after Hydaspes is flled with joy at seeing the prisoners “as, did he but know it, the prophetic intuition of his heart exerted its power over him” (9.1.3). Hydaspes’ earlier response to a prophetic dream to mate indicates that he can respond to the nonrational. But in a precursor to his resistance later, he immediately reinterprets this as an omen of coming victory. The replacement of Arsake’s chains with gold chains (9.2.1),137 followed by the interlude of the siege of Syene, presents a cliffhanger from the perspective of Theagenes and Charikleia, but also allows readers to observe the merciful and harsher sides of Hydaspes. A new political paradigm will be also established, in which the gymnosophists will have a greater infuence on Hydaspes, a possible prelude to their expanded role when Theagenes and Charikleia reign. As noted, Hydaspes is compelled to protect the word of the father with its values of order, logic and plausibility.138 Cassiopeia’s vain boasting had insulted the gods and forced her husband to attempt to sacrifce Andromeda. In contrast, Persinna, more virtuous than Cassiopeia, was given by the gods a wondrous prodigy, but her understandable lack of faith in her husband, who might have destroyed the child, caused Charikleia to face exile and near-sacrifce. Trial scenes are a standard of ancient novels, and Charikleia will act as a defense attorney for herself and (implicitly) for Persinna. The Ethiopian succession being at stake, the highest standards for justice must be maintained, but the prodigy Charikleia challenges the patriarchal order—how

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do you convincingly narrate the highly implausible? In patriarchal systems, there is no place for “feminine wisdom” or mystic revelations that cannot be accommodated within the rule of symbol-governed law. Hydaspes focuses on the “probable,” and will dismiss Charikleia’s possession of the recognition tokens, something that worked in previous ideal novels. Charikleia’s often exasperating behavior does not help. Yet, fnally, Hydaspes surrenders to an utterly improbable item of evidence, a painting of Andromeda which Charikleia resembles completely (Whitmarsh, “Birth” 116–17). Earlier, Hydaspes swore he had a divine command to mate, but never really grasped the event’s full meaning; now, while Hydaspes tries to fgure matters out according to the probable, Sisimithres shows that the Divine is the real author of Charikleia’s drama.139 Still in Syene, Hydaspes offered thanksgiving to the Gods (9.22; a preliminary of what shall happen at Meroe), then he made inquiries about the Neiloa, a transition from a consideration of secular to religious and mythic matters (9.22).140 Theagenes assumes that Charikleia will now reveal her identity to her father, but Charikleia responds: “My darling, great ends can only be achieved by means of equal greatness. A story whose beginnings heaven has made convoluted cannot be quickly resolved” (9.24.4). She stresses the centrality of Persinna, thinking that maternal instinct will provide conclusive evidence, but this will avail nothing. Note earlier, when Hydaspes frst looks directly upon Theagenes and Charikleia, he leaps from his chair in astonishment (9.25.1) and recounts his discounted dream that a daughter had been born to him and immediately grew up, identical to the girl before him; his retainers suggest that his dreams prefgure the future, but he again represses mystic implications and sees it as a victory omen. Theagenes continues the ruse of their being brother and sister, which will complicate matters further. Charikleia’s statement that her parents would be revealed at the altars of the gods to whom she is to be sacrifced (9.25.4) both predicts coming events, as does Hydaspes’ bemused comment about how it would require a miracle for her presumably white parents to show up at Meroe. Hydaspes, heading to Meroe, writes a letter to the gymnosophists requesting their presence at the traditional sacrifces and to Persinna (10.2), who also mentions an identical dream of a daughter,141 and likewise ignores the dream’s oracular implications. Persinna begins arranging the sacrifces, and she personally delivers Hydaspes’ letter to the gymnosophists, showing her signifcant state role (10.3), yet her coming diffculties are implied by the sexism of Hydaspes’ command, that only males could greet the arriving king and take part the ensuing sacrifces; females, if only unwillingly, could pollute the sacrifces. On the following day, the Ethiopians give Hydaspes godlike respects and he begins the sacrifces (10.6). As in Iphigeneia at Aulis, Hydaspes,142 seeing that the shouting and disorderly commons want the human sacrifce, moves quickly to defer to them (10.7.2), since the nomos of the people demands it (10.7.6). Especially in the East, public spaces (such as theaters and

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amphitheaters) were sites of political activity, where the massed population attending spectacles, the often-fckle mob, could attempt to infuence the emperor. The interactions of Hydaspes and the Ethiopian population refect this; Sisimithres notes Hydaspes is following the (mistaken) will of the people (10.9). As Charikleia is brought forward for the gridiron test, she stares at Persinna (10.7.3) and puts on her priestess robe as at Memphis and then begins the “public performance of her genealogy.”143 Her model Odysseus constituted his identity through narrative,144 but Charikleia’s sort of forensic and Odyssean arguments fail to convince the angered Hydaspes and her strategic use of the priestess costume is at best partially successful.145 This neutralization of rhetoric agrees with the underlying notion that effective divine action, exceeding human thought categories, can only be observed, not understood. Accordingly, recalling a devotee of both Dionysos and Artemis, Charikleia makes her epiphany on the gridiron in a scene rich in aretalogical elements (Merkelbach, “Novel” 288). She stands before the Ethiopians more like a statue than a mortal woman (10.9.3); her beauty blazes out and causes awe (10.9.4). Here, instead of being described as a bride in a bridal chamber of fre, Charikleia is described as a goddess.146 Charikleia falls pleading for intervention at Sisimithres’ feet (10.10), beginning the trial proceeding, the central drama of the recognition process. As Charikleia had invoked the Sun and other gods before her trial upon the pyre at Memphis, she makes a similar plea as her opening statement and then after discussing methods of evidence (10.12) brings forth the tania (10.13.1) and later the pantarbē and other jewels. Due to her fear that the disbelieving Hydaspes might possibly become “angry and vengeful” (Whitmarsh, “Birth” 117; Morgan, “Sense” 313), thus dooming Charikleia, the disturbed Persinna lapses into “forlorn silence” (10.13.1). Indeed, due to Charikleia’s whiteness, Hydaspes will not accept any such evidences or even Sisimithres’ testimony (10.14.3). The painting must be brought out which resembles Charikleia in every particular;147 signifcantly, it depicts the moment when Perseus has just released Andromeda from her bonds and is assisting her down from the rocks, fguring the central role Theagenes played in Charikleia’s liberation. Sisimithres, to further assure Hydaspes, produces one more bit of evidence, asking Charikleia to not be embarrassed and to expose the black band on her arm (10.15.2), which again aligns her with Odysseus.148 But Odysseus’ scar is also the sign of the trauma a young man can be made to suffer as part of his rites of passage. The black ring is described as a stain, and one thinks of how bloodstains are often, as in Homer, associated with “black blood” (Morgan, “Sense” 307). Thus, the black ring can symbolize all the traumas Charikleia has undergone, for to come properly of age, she had to contend (like Kalasiris’ Homer) with the consequences of a body that suggests both sexual transgression and divine intervention, the mysteries of her hybrid and unique nature, a bit like Harry Potter’s scar. Homer’s hairy thigh was exposed when he has to reveal himself before his clansmen; but here, the

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outcome is reversed, for her mark denotes legitimacy. Charikleia in a sense is exposed, too, before the citizens of Meroe.149 Persinna’s subsequent, almost animal, howling shows her deep relief at Hydaspes’ recognition of his daughter. But Hydaspes appears to seriously consider sacrifcing his daughter, his apparent hardness of heart giving another Odyssey intertext (19.209 ff.), but then produces a clever, drama-evoking speech to the crowd concerning his willingness to sacrifce Charikleia (10.16.3).150 People reject this violently (10.17.1), which recalls how the people of Memphis, confronted with the miracle of the pyre, protested vigorously against Arsake, suggesting that the similarity between what Hydaspes and Arsake were attempting. Earlier, there had been universal celebrations in anticipation of the birth of Persinna’s child (4.8). Similarly, the Syracusan crowds, inspired by Eros, forced Hermocrates to allow Chaereas and Callirhoe to wed; Meroe’s crowds now likewise compel Hydaspes to abandon any notion of sacrifcing Charikleia (10.17). Now, Theagenes, to be saved, will build upon his mythic roles. Just as Perseus’ heroic action made marriage with Andromeda possible, it is Theagenes’ heroic action that averts his own sacrifce and makes possible his marriage. Andromeda was already engaged to be married to somebody else, and Perseus has to fght to marry her, as Charikleia has a husband picked out for her by Hydaspes, whom Theagenes, in displaced fashion, will fght. But frst Charikleia asks to be allowed to sacrifce Theagenes and then says she already has a husband, if her parents consent (10.21.2). These repeated and confusing miscommunications are more than dramatic plot complications, but represent the last (repressed) resistance of Charikleia to the idea of being married. She was always ready theoretically, but now they are playing before real people in the real world. Before she explains further, Hydaspes, enraged, orders Persinna to take her away; again, observes Hydaspes’ suspicion of the soundness woman’s minds. In the interlude, Hydaspes calls forth the ambassadors, Merebos frst (10.23). He has sized up Merebos as a good prospect, probably not only as a husband, but as a potential ruler, and he becomes a potential and dangerous rival to Theagenes. The wrestler he has brought challenges the commons, but nobody rises to the occasion, putting the commons in its place. When the sacrifcial bulls are panicked by the Auxomitai’s giraffe, Theagenes (divinely prompted?) does his bit of Thessalian bull-tossing (10.28.4–30.5). The Roman-era arena, with its spectacle and punishments, is often seen as space where communal identity was increased through an emotionally intense spectacle of the control and destruction of potential enemies and forces of chaos; the area in which the fnal ceremonies are enacted at Meroe is such a theatrical space. After his bull-tossing triumph, as in the amphitheater, the crowds clamor for him to fght the giant wrestler. Hydaspes feels obliged to defer to the crowd’s passions.151 Theagenes, in defeating the giant, becomes aligned with people against people’s (elite) enemy, as well as continuing the

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epic tradition of Greeks fghting monstrous others (Whitmarsh, Narrarive 123). The crowd’s subsequent thunderous acclaim establishes Theagenes’ heroic status. Morgan suggests that this is a rite of passage so Theagenes can become Ethiopian, part of the process whereby pure Greekness is infused into Meroe (“Narrative Doublets” 75). But it is also Theagenes’ contribution to the process of cleansing away the inhuman aspects from Meroitic culture. His defeat of the savage giant, who represents the power that Charikleia still may be sacrifced to in an arranged marriage, also mirrors Perseus’ defeat of Cetus, both defeats being preliminaries to the hero’s marriage. But Hydaspes, even with the crowd willing, cannot simply spare Theagenes. He makes the mythic mistake of telling Theagenes that he will give him whatever he wants—and Theagenes answers that he wants Charikleia, who is in fact married, to sacrifce him—as Charikleia had previously asked, inspiring a similar indignation in Hydaspes. Thus, Merebos, his rival, has Theagenes sent back among the sacrifcial victims (10.33.4), and Charikleia again must abandon her failed rhetorical ways and speak plainly to her mother (Temmerman 298–99). Meanwhile, Hydaspes receives Oroondates, who stresses Hydaspes’ goodness as a ruler, proleptic of coming resolutions. Earlier, Hydaspes had referred to a miracle necessary to make Charikleia’s supposedly white parents appear at Meroe. This miracle now (sort of) happens. Kalasiris was rewarded for his part in the divine plan; this is likewise true of Charikles, whose deep devotion to Charikleia was sincere, if limited, making him a sympathetic fgure (Morgan, “Sense” 317). Charikles had been deeply hurt, and Charikleia and Theagenes (who suspects Charikles knows Hydaspes is Charikleia’s father)152 want to make amends. Charikles’ plain-spoken account and Theagenes’ reaction clarify the relationship between Theagenes and Charikleia, in preparation for the return of Persinna and Charikleia to the main stage. Soon Charikleia will be at rest knowing that Charikles, who sees the fulfllment of the oracle of his god, has realized the workings of the divine will (Morgan, “Heliodorus the Hellene” 261). Sisimithres, understanding all, now embraces Charikles, while Charikleia runs to her Greek father like a maenad, confesses her deep misdeeds and asks forgiveness in the name of heaven’s plan. In a scene of utopian unity, people cheer Persinna’s proclamation about Theagenes’ relationship with Charikleia (10.38). Then, the overwhelmed Hydaspes turns to Sisimithres and asks: “What are we to do, All-wise one?”—speaking in Ethiopian and breaking down the divide between nobles and commons at this moment of national transformation. Sisimithres gently upbraids Hydaspes: Sire, . . . it seems that a surfeit of joy can cloud even the most intelligent of minds. You ought to have realized long ago that the gods have no desire for the sacrifce you are making ready to offer: frst, on the very altar of sacrifce, they revealed the blessed lady Charikleia to be your daughter and dramatically transported her foster father here from the

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Heliodorus’ Aithiopika heart of Greece; then they cast fright and panic among the sacrifcial bulls and horses and so gave a sign that those sacrifces that are thought superior would also be cut short; and now, to make our happiness complete, as a theatrical climax they have revealed that this young stranger is betrothed to the maiden. Let us not be blind to the miracles the gods have wrought; let us not thwart their purpose; let us abolish human sacrifce forevermore and hold to purer forms of offering! (10.39)

Hydaspes, too, responds in Ethiopian, accepting Sisimithres’ criticisms, the devices of the gods and proclaiming the couple is actually already married153 and free to live as man and wife. He removes the miters of Persinna and himself and puts them on Charikleia and Theagenes, signaling a transference of power. Here, they also fulfll the prophecy at Delphi, by becoming symbolically black (Morgan, “Sense” 318). The verb συνεῖναι, which describes their union (10.41.1), is the same one used to describe the union of Isis and Osiris (9.9.5; Grethlein 329), and the undescribed “more mystic parts of the marriage” recall those elements of the mysteries of Isis and Osiris that the narrator, in Herodotean fashion, passes over (9.10.1). Now, as the new priest of the Sun and priestess of the Moon, bound by a mystic, sacramental union, they will be able to speak their own word. Yet, if there is one thing lacking, it is an acknowledgment by Hydaspes of Persinna’s suffering and virtue and the sort of absolute trust in Callirhoe that Chaereas declares to the Syracusans at the novel’s end. But perhaps this is compensated for by the vastly greater trust of Theagenes, a Greek male who has given up his old world for Charikleia, to whom he will be subordinate. As suggested above, the subtext is that an ideal government should employ theosophy. The white horses and oxen that pull the lovers’ chariot likewise refer to the grand myth of the Phaedrus.154 So not only will Charikleia and Theagenes be Priests of the Moon and Sun (and eventually King and Queen), but they will have in Sisimithres a superior version of Kalasiris to guide them in ruling the state.

The utopian in the Aithiopika The utopian in the Aithiopika is best located in its philosophically infected religious myths. As do various faiths, it offers a view of divinity working within a generally horrifc world in obscure ways to create both more ideal nations and raise exceptional individuals to initiate change and progress. Its theosophic–mystic elements posit an innate link to the divine that individuals and nations might possess. The realism, complexity, exoticness and mystery of Heliodorus’ world and the way his protagonists manage to be saintly while retaining recognizable humanity, can, to those sympathetic to these elements, suggest something of what might just be “things that are truly mystical and imbued with a pleasure that is indeed divine” (5.16.3).

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Notes 1 I use the Greek text of Rattenbury and Lumb, and Morgan’s translation (Ethiopian Story). 2 I hold to a fourth-century date for Heliodorus, being Julian’s imitator. On Heliodorus’ date, see Morgan, “Heliodoros”; Chuvin 321–25; Futre Pinheiro, “Heliodorus” 77; Rhode 496–97. 3 On Heliodorus as a promoter of second- (or maybe third-) sophistic literary tropes, see Colonna; Giangrande, “On”; Feuillâtre 51–102. 4 On the opening, see Anderson, “ΣΩΦΡΟΣΥΝΗ” 303–06; Telò; Bühler 180–81; Dowden, “Heliodoros” 268; Winkler, “Mendacity” 95–114; Bartsch, Decoding 107–77; Morgan, “Story” 103–04; Whitmarsh, “Written” 116–17. 5 See Morgan, “Reader” 86–90 and “Aithiopika”; Whitmarsh, Narrative 135. 6 De Chariclea et Leucippe iudicium 19–23; see Hilton, “Ethiopian Paradox” 80. 7 Barsch, Decoding 46–47; Hunter, “Ancient Readers” 265; Whitmarsh, Narrative 132–33; Winkler, “Mendacity”; Dowden, “Heliodoros” 268; Bowie, “Greek Novel” 696. 8 Elmer; Morgan, “Reader.” 9 Morgan, “History”. Heliodorus creates a sense that the world and events depicted are imaginatively possible, with many details derived from literature. Yet he sometimes gives unneeded insight into the motivations of minor characters, suggesting a real world lay behind these descriptions. For depth of motivation,also Feuillâtre 43–44. 10 Telò 601, who cites Woolf 309. 11 Telò 585. For references to the Odyssey, see Whitmarsh, “Birth” and Narrative 112–15; Fusillo, Romanzo 28–32; Feuillâtre 105–14; Anderson, “ΣΩΦΡΟΣΥΝΗ” 305–06; Hunter, “Homer” 251–52. 12 See Whitmarsh, “Writes” 18–20, citing Segal, “Trials”; Moreau; Vidal-Naquet; Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults. 13 For the use of archetypes in the Odyssey, see Lord; Sowa; Segal, “Transition.” 14 On tragedy as part of the common cultural language of late antiquity, see Easterling and Miles. On the infuence of drama, see Marino; Montes Cala; Paulsen; Laplace, “Théâtre”; Morgan, “Heliodorus the Hellene” 269. 15 Heliodorus more than all the extent Greek novelists depicts actions of the plot as divinely guided; see Futre Pinheiro, “Heliodorus” 88; Whitmarsh, Narrative 201; Bartsch, Decoding 93–108. 16 Telò 593; Most, “Allegory” 164; see also Whitmarsh, Narrative 51–52 and “Birth.” 17 Consider the lamentation of the heroes, which suggest a less optimistic perspective, e.g., 1.8.2–3, 2.1.2–3, 2.4.1–4, 5.2.7, 4.19.6–9, 5.2.7–10, 5.6.2–4, 5.20.4, 6.8.3– 6, 7.14 and 7.25.4–6; also see Morgan, “sense” 303. References to malevolent powers: 2.5.4, 2.25.3, 4.19.3, 5.2.7, 5.6.2, 5.27.1, 6.8.3, 6.12.1 and 7.25.7. 18 Burkert thought that the Aithiopika “most diligently exploits a religious dimension” (Ancient Mystery Cults 67). Heliodorus implies divine causes behind events in his frequent use of ἴσως (perhaps), as in 2.20.2: “Perhaps it was destiny’s will that his life should end in a way so beftting his character” (Morgan, Ethiopian Story 392). Also Dowden, “Heliodoros” 276. 19 Whitmarsh, Narrative and Dirty Love; also Hilton, “Ethiopian Paradox” 80. 20 Whitmarsh (“Writes” 26) sees the tenth book as a sort of holy epilogue, like the eleventh book of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses; Elmer 427. 21 Whitmarsh, “Birth” 98; Szepessy 244. Létoublon (108–09) sees the narrative as linear, what happened before as less meaningful prehistory; also Hägg, Novel 70; Reardon, Courants 384. 22 On the centrality of Delphi, see Hilton, “Theagenes.”

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23 On a circular narrative see Hilton, “Ethiopian Paradox” 79. On the power of the past, see Telò 603; Futre Pinheiro, “Heliodorus” 86; also Anderson, “ΣΩΦΡΟΣΥΝΗ” 306. 24 See Whitmarsh, “Writes” 22, citing Segal, Singers, “Phaeacians” and “Transition.” 25 For cultural background in Heliodorus, see Rogier; Lonis; Kuch; Morgan, “History”; Whitmarsh, “Writes.” 26 Note Sisimithres sees Charikles as being a “true Greek” (2.32). 27 Knemon recalls New Comedy; see Montes Cala; Oudot 104–05; Grethlein 323–24. 28 Smith (“Wonders”) also suggests that the Ethiopian boat going over the fooded land around Syene recalls the ship that was carried overland during the greater Panathenaia. 29 Heliodorus reads the Persians as the Greeks imagine Persians contrasting themselves with Greeks; see Morgan, “Heliodorus the Hellene” 273. 30 On the infuence of Egypt on the Greek imagination, Egyptian wisdom and texts seen as a source for secrets unknown to the Greeks, see Stephens, “Fictions.” 31 For discussion, see Nimis, “Egypt”; Brioso Sánchez; Sandy, “Characterization” 146. 32 When Thyamis realizes how his dreams have deceived him, he becomes a monster, even cursing the goddess (1.30). As in Chariton, Easterners are more susceptible to Eros; thus, as Artaxerxes is aroused at the mere report of Callirhoe, Oroondates is excited by Charikleia’s description (8.2). 33 Heliodorus may have learned of Julian’s destruction in 363 CE and the humiliating peace made with Parthia shortly after, underscoring Rome’s critical weakness. 34 Hägg, “Black Land” 197. Whitmarsh (Narrative 124) notes that in Heliodorus Eithiopians seem to read themselves as Greeks would. 35 On these utopian aspects, see Bidez 249–87; Alvares, “Utopian Themes”; Szepessy; Futre Pinheiro, “Utopia” 159–64; Whitmarsh, “Writes” 23, citing Romm 49–54. 36 For example, the presence of the phoenix (cf. Philostr. VA 3.49 and Heliod. 6.33. Heliodorus’ Gymnsophists recall his Brahmins. See Chew, “Eyeing” 234. Lefteratou suggests the text shows “the homogenous reception of southern lands from a Mediterranean perspective” (5). 37 In the early fourth century, the Asumite King Ezana converted his kingdom to Christianity, and Greek and Latin are found in Aksumite inscriptions; see Lefteratou 4, citing Munro-Hay 75. 38 On how Heliodorus may choose his names according to whether the character demonstrates “heavenly” or “pandemic” love, see Jones, “Heavenly and Pandemic Names.” 39 Whitmarsh, Narrative 124 and “Writes” 22–23; Hägg, “Black Land” 207; Morgan, “History” 247–49. 40 Interestingly, the Brahmins’ lack of fear of death on a pyre (see Cic. Tusc. 5.77– 78) may provide a model for Charicleia’s bravery; Chew, “Eyeing” 234. 41 Hilton, “Ethiopian Paradox” 90; Morgan, “History” 240–42. 42 Recall the medieval legends of Prester John, the ruler of a vast empire in Ethiopia or in the East who opposed the forces of Islam; see Bar-Ilan for discussion and further bibliography. 43 In Heliodorus’ probable time there was considerable border warfare in the area where actual emerald mines were located; see Morgan, “History” 246; Hägg, “Black Land” 213–14. 44 Xen. Hell. 4.1.29-41; Plut. Ages. 12; Morgan, “History” 248.

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45 On possible connections with Apollonius of Tyana, see Whitmarsh, “Writes” 24; Morgan, “Heliodoros” 453. 46 Hydaspes’ mercy, righteousness, respect for law and graciousness to his people create a nearly flial bond with them (10.3.3 and 10.17.2); on Hydaspes’ ideal rule, see Szepessy 247–51. 47 There is ample evidence for human sacrifce at Meroe connected with military matters; see Hägg, “Black Land” 210, who in particular cites Török’s comment on the inscription SEG XXXII 1601 in Eide et al. 1099. 48 In Freudian/Lacanian terms, Ganges perhaps can be seen as the primal father who is killed by his children. 49 I see a parallel in how corrections are made due to a primal murder, the murder of Ganges among the Ethiopians and the murder of Neoptolemus among the Greeks. 50 MacMullen, Enemies 255–68; Scarcella, “Metastasi”; Anderson, Ancient Fiction 89 ff.; McGing; Alston; Rutherford. 51 Dowden, “Heliodoros” 277; also Paulsen 49; Temmerman 292–93. As Daphnis later avoided seeing Chloe naked, Thyamis also shuns seeing Charikleia out of respect for her (1.23). 52 On such decentering and displacement from Hellenocentric norms, see Whitmarsh, “Birth,” “Writes” and Narrative 112–25; Smith, “Wonders” 227–34. 53 On the Aithiopika as a kind of historical novel, see Hägg, “Callirhoe.” 54 On the importance of Artemis and Apollo being connected with his imitation of Xenophon of Ephesus, see Whitmarsh, Narrative 110. 55 Morgan, “Emesan Connection.” The emperor Julian also claimed Helios sent him a dream about Constantius’ coming death (Zos. 3.9.6). 56 As seen from Cornutus’ Epidrome 27; see Dowden (“Heliodoros” 271). 57 Dowling; on Neopythagoreanism, see Rohde; Kahn 94–138. 58 Whitmarsh, Narrative 122; see also Dowden, “Heliodoros” 280–83. 59 Fowler, “Second Thoughts”; also Morgan, “Sense”; Nimis, “Oral and Written Forms” 188–93. 60 Kruchió fnds Sisimithres’ reinterpretation of the careers of Charikleia and company to violate the the reader’s expectations and thus problematic; but that is the very genius of Heliodorus work, that the love of Charikleia and Theagenes could be a revealed as the divine instrument for a world-historical purpose (153–75). 61 On the Andromeda myth, see Whitmarsh, Narrative 116; Billault, “Mythe.” Concerning “maternal impression” and Charikleia’s “triangular conception,” see Reeve; Whitmarsh, “Birth”112–13; Dilke; Anderson, “ΣΩΦΡΟΣΥΝΗ”; Hilton, “Ethiopian Paradox” 84–88. 62 On Charikleia and statues, see 1.72.2, 2.33.2 and 10.9.3. 63 On the novel’s ekphrases, see Bartsch, Decoding 120–22; Hardie; Whitmarsh, “Written” 116–21. 64 In Xenophon’s Ephesiaka, both Habrocomes and Anthia are likewise explicitly and instantly captivated by the sight and beauty of the other. 65 Montiglio, Love 119, citing Paulsen 42; see also Papadimitropoulos 103, n. 8; recall how during the footrace Charikleia’s feet start to skip and dance “as if . . . her soul were fying beside Theagenes” (4.3.3). 66 Montiglio, Love 118–19, citing Feuillâtre 125–28; Walker 135–36; Winkler, “Mendacity”125; Dowden “Heliodoros” 279, n. 35. 67 The Aithiopika is awash in doublets and triplets; see Morgan, “Narrative Doublets.” Such duplications can suggest that characters and events in life are based upon primal archetypes, differently expressed, but displaying a fundamental similarity.

200 Heliodorus’ Aithiopika 68 The Platonizing beginning of the Gospel of John equates Jesus with an ontologically prior logos; is not Charikleia like a copy of a logos? 69 Signifcantly, Demainete tells Aristippos he can see Thisbe at the Gardens of the Epicureans (1.16 ff.), suggesting the Epicurean focus on pleasure. Note Demainete meets her death at the pit near Plato’s Academy; Dowden, “Heliodoros” 270. The cave in which Thisbe is found recalls Plato’s allegory; Morgan, “Heliodoros” and “Heliodorus.” 70 Whitmarsh, Narrative 117–19; Tagliabue 204–08. 71 It also suggests, even at this early stage, she is thinking of how to use her supposed status as priestess of Artemis to protect her virginity, as Anthia does. 72 E.g., the New Testament’s declaration that a person’s works will be tested by fre (1 Cor. 3: 8–15 and Rev. 22:12); Morgan, “Narrative Doublets” 71–72. 73 Giants are archetypal fgures of arrogance, power and chaos (e.g., the Greek Gigantomachy) and some apocalyptic writings (the Apocalypse of Peter and the Book of Enoch) give a prominent position to the defeat of giants; St. Perpetua (Mart. Perpet. 9–10) tells of fghting a giant Egyptian in a dream, recognized by commentators as the devil; later in John Moschus (for Latin version, see Migne PL 74.150) this fgure becomes an Ethiopian. Theagenes’ defeat of the “giant” Ethiopian recalls this archetypal image. The match between Castor and Amycus in the Argonautica is also recalled. Myths often contain outsiders whose presence is needed to remedy a crisis situation, a role Aeneas and Hercules play in the Aeneid, and Theagenes here; Hildalgo de la Vega 175–88; also Morgan, “Narrative Doublets” 62–64 and 73–77. 74 Such a primal evil that explains subsequent evils is a factor common to foundation myths such as the story of Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, or Tantalus’ cooking of Pelops. 75 Theagenes is descended from Hellen, son of Deucalion (2.34.2); Whitmarsh, “Birth” 103. 76 Such a return to the Urzeit is stressed especially by Eliade. 77 Hilton, “Ethiopian Paradox” 88–89; Alvares, “Utopian Themes”; Dowden, “Heliodoros”; Kövendi; Reardon, Courants 285–390. 78 This ten-year period corresponds to the roughly ten-year period in which Odysseus is separated from any contact with Greeks, his core identity, and Charikles, like Calypso, is hiding Charikleia. If he had had his way, she would have permanently lost her real identity; Morgan, “Heliodorus the Hellene” 268. 79 See Pizzone. Knemon, like Phaedrus, gets a very different narrative performance than he had expected. But, just as Longus’ Eros-myth offers a superior view of love, so Kalasiris’ Platonically infected Charikleia and Theagenes myth likewise reveals much about Love’s nature. And as Phaedrus frst quoted Lysias speech on mercenary love, so Knemon tells his own story of debauched Athenian love; as Socrates produces an ideal account of love, so Kalasiris gives the story of Charikleia and Theagenes. 80 Recalling Admetus’ plea to the dying Alcestis (Eur. Alc. 276–79); Capettini 200–01. 81 Later, Knemon remarks that they will never know about Thisbe’s arrival and death “unless some God reveals it to us” (2.9), at which point Thisbe’s tablet is discovered; Dowden, “Heliodoros” 272–74. 82 Thisbe’s status as Charikleia’s “evil twin” is observed as Thyamis kills her thinking she is Charikleia, and Theagenes mourns her as if Charikleia. Charikleia goes along with Nausikles’ ruse and adopts the name Thisbe (3.1). That Nausikles then claims to buy “a better Thisbe” and that Thisbe dies in place of Charikleia implies that, even in Charikleia, there exists Thisbe potential. The protagonists’ need for recognition tokens, and how Theagenes fails to

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recognize Charikleia at Thebes, also suggests how Egypt’s hellworld threatens their identities, as Odysseus’ journeys threaten to make him a No-Man. The Ethiopian people likewise will demand from Hydapses that Charikleia not be sacrifced. See Edsall 128. This scene recalls the account in St. Basil’s The Life and Miracles of Saint Thecla, where (1.12.57–62) the fre forms itself into a marriage bed; see Andújar 147–49. See Morgan, “Sense” 304 about the positive and negative implications of their two dreams. On Knemon’s unfortunate love story, see Morgan, “Story” 107–11. Arsake’s evils differ from those of Demainete only in that, as in Chariton’s Great King, her desires and threats are backed up by state power. Knemon’s story clearly evokes tragedy, New Comedy and Athenian oratory and legal procedure; see Montes Cala; Oudot 104–05. See Wasdin, who notes how often these fgures are referred to by the protagonists; see also Altheim 14–20; Merkelbach, Roman 234–98. E.g., Xenophon’s Anthia, reunited with Habrocomes, says: “I remained chaste, after practicing every device of virtue [sōphrosynē]” (5.14.2; Anderson, Ephesian Tale 169). There is a strong polarization in the fates of those who have given into impure desire—nearly all die; Dowden, “Heliodoros” 273. Hilton, “Ethiopian Paradox” 90; note how the scandalous circumstances of Charikleia’s birth, according to Kalasiris, resemble Homer’s (3.14.4). Morgan, “Ethiopian Story” 355, n. 2; Capettini 202–03; Kövendi 161; Winkler, “Mendacity”; Whitmarsh, “Birth”; Elmer 432–47 remark on the connection between Charikleia and the Nile, in turn connected to the mystic relationship of Isis with Osiris. Charikles is supposed to meet Sisimithres at an Isis temple (2.32.2), and Thyamis dreams that Isis hand Charikleia to him (1.18.4). Capettini 203–08. By Heliodorus’ era, Aphrodite has been assimiliated to Isis—and vice versa. Cueva, Myths 83–90. And, according to Greek-infuenced Roman legend, he was resurrected by Apollo’s son Aesculapius to become the Virbius worshiped in conjunction with Diana, the Roman Artemis (Ver. Aen. 7.761–64) and Servius’ commentary ad loc.). Morgan, “Narrative Doublets” 71–72; Hilton, “Ethiopian Paradox” 88. Telò 603. Perseus and Andromeda are also mentioned in Luc. Dom. 22. For Perseus and Andromeda in art, see Schauenburg 781–82. Morgan, Ethiopian Story 354, n. 2. Early on the narrator declares the beach spectacle was arranged by a daimon (1.1.6) and during the battle, the pirates think the arrows come from daimones (5.32.4; Grethlein 319). Perhaps following Herodotus, who even puts Nysa in Ethiopia (Hdt. 2.146.2). See Capettini in Cueva et al. 338; Hardie (34–35) suggests the snakes on her costume worn during the Delphic process (3.4) represent forces that possibly threaten her sōphrosynē, thus connecting them to Charikleia’s “Bacchic” tendencies. Note that Knemon (2.23.5) declares how Dionysos impels him (Knemon) to demand Kalasiris to fnish his account of Theagenes and Charkleia. Such as promising to marry Thyamis, and later Pelorus to buy time (4.13.3)—a ruse which she later instructs Theagenes to use with Arsake (7.18–21). On Charikleia’s duplicities, see Bartsch, Decoding 77–78; Termmerman 258–69. See Whitmarsh, “Birth” and Narrative 125–28; Perkins, “Ancient ‘Passing’ Novel”; Temmeman 277. See Whitmarsh, “Birth”; Bonneau; Plazenet; Elmer 432–47.

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103 Morgan, Ethiopian Story 544, n. 207. Indeed, the most signifcant thing for the Greeks about the Nile is exactly that it is wrapped up in a mystery of origins; Whitmarsh, Narrative 120; Plazenet 20–22. 104 Whitmarsh, Narrative 121. On the importance of Apollonius of Tyana for Heliodorus, see Bowie, “Apollonius” 1664–65 and “Literary Millieux” 32–33. 105 The tania points again to the Aithiopika’s non-Hellenic orientation, for it cannot be read from a Greek perspective; Whitmarsh, “Birth” 119. The strange script suggests something prodigous has happened; Hilton, “Ethiopian Paradox” 81. 106 Persinna must somehow retain propriety while describing intimate sexual activity. 107 The prior letter from Thisbe to Knemon functions as a contrasting prelude, for both have lives upended through erotic scandal, and the tania’s message is directed to a daughter who might be dead, while Thisbe is dead when her message is read. 108 On the four episodes that cast Theagenes as a hero, see Paulsen 48–49; Morgan, “Narrative Doublets” 72–77. 109 Whitmarsh, “Birth” 100–03; Hammond esp. 158. 110 Montiglio suggests the scar he shares with Odysseus (5.5.2) is proof of his archetypal Hellenism (Love 231). 111 This depiction of Delphic procession is mostly rhetorical fction; Lateiner, “Abduction Marriage.” Heliodorus’ account may depend of Philostratus’ account of the cult of Protesiliaos in the Heroikos, especially 9.1–23.30. Some rehabilitation of Neoptolemus is seen in Quintus of Smyrna’s Trojan Epic; see Hilton, “Cult.” 112 In their deceptions, Theagenes is referred to as a priest of Apollo, a god equated with Helios, whose priest Theagenes in fact becomes. 113 Another mythological tidbit; according to scholiasts, Medea and Achilles eventually marry on the Isles of the Blest or Elysium, and we recall how Meroe is a utopic state at the world’s edge; see scholiast on Ap. Rhod. Argon. 4. 814 ff. 114 For example, in Xenophon of Ephesus, Habrocomes rejects Euxeinus’ attempt to persuade him to give in to Corymbus, declaring: “I could not submit to Corymbus. I will die frst and prove my chastity with my own dead body!” (2.1.4–5; Anderson, Ephesian Tale 139). Note how Habrocomes invites Manto to threaten his enslaved body with all the torments she can devise, for he will not betray Anthia (2.4.4); see Doulamis. 115 Notably in the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, where Apollo stands calm amid the battle, the south metopes on the Parthenon, the friezes on the temple of Apollo at Bassai and the temple to Hephaistos at Athens. 116 On Centaurs, see duBois; also Padgett; Westervelt. 117 Recalling how Chaereas’ men become devoted to him during the Egyptian rebellion. 118 On Kalasiris as trickster, see Sandy, “Characterization” 142–46; Winkler, “Mendacity”; Futre Pinheiro, “Calasiris’ Story”; Paulsen, 178–83; Kim, “Trouble”; Dowden, “Heliodoros.” 119 Kalasiris had to leave Memphis due to a possible sexual scandal; Lucian’s Peregrinus Proteus was noted for sexual scandal, although his self-exile was due to patricide (De mort. Peregr. 9–10), and he has similar theatrical tendencies; Sandy, “Characterization” 151–53. 120 Note how he begins his narrative to Knemon at 2.21.5 with an allusion to Hom. Od. 9.39. On novelistic alter ego, see Telò 604; Whitmarsh, “Birth” 100–07 and Narrative 211–23. On metaliterary role of Kalasiris, see Winkler, “Mendacity”; Elmer 414–16.

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121 See Baumbach. Kalasiris’ description of Delphi as a place of retreat for philosophers probably derives from Plut. De def. or. 410a; see Nobili 19. The scene at Delphi also draws on Euripides’ Ion; see Clavo. 122 Egyptian thought did not make this distinction; Stephens, “Fictions” 99, citing Ritner 147. 123 See Hdt. 2.36; Met 11.30. See also Stephens, “Fictions” 92, who cites P. Oxy 1381. 124 As seen in his considerable paideia, his care in performing proper rituals, his rejection of magic and abstinence from wine and meat. Kalasiris seems at Delphi a “visiting fellow in Comparative religion” (Anderson, Ancient Fiction 91); see also Baumbach; Billault, “Holy Man” 126. 125 Winkler, “Mendacity”; Sandy, “Characterization” 143–46; Morgan, “Heliodoros” 453; Dowden, “Heliodoros” 283; Futre Pinheiro, “Calasiris’ Story” 79; Berry 91–101. 126 He recalls Merlin in Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, whose wonder-working was always problematical, but who was exiled into the future to help Ransom stop N.I.C.E. (a sinister research institute) and thus atone for his problematical use of magic before he dies permanently. 127 The only other Greek who obtained such a reception was Lycurgus, the primal reformer of Sparta; note Charikleia and Theagenes will be reformers of Meroe. 128 See Hefti 74 ff.; Winkler, “Mendacity”; Morgan, “Heliodoros.” 129 On Rhodopis as part of the divine machinery, see Morgan, Ethiopian Story 399, n. 59. 130 Note the sycamore functioned as the Egyptian “Tree of Life”; Massey 351. 131 Paaphis in Wonders Beyond Thule also has many of these Egyptian powers; Stephens “Fictions” 97. 132 Here I cite the composite translation of Dowden (Alexander Romance). 133 Pl. Symp. 208e–209e; Wasdin 391. 134 Note that we hear nothing of Theagenes’ real parents; Wasdin 394. 135 Winkler, “Mendacity” 148–49; but I fnd it far more plausible that the dream predicts Charikleia’s approaching separation from Theagenes. 136 Wasdin 396. Abram/Abraham uses a similar trick in respect to his wife Sarah and the Pharaoh (Gen. 12:10–20) and Abimelech (Gen. 20:1–16); Isaac uses this trick, too (Gen. 26:1–33). 137 Morgan shows how this event can fulfll Theagenes’ dream, but not necessarily foretell a good ultimate ending (“Sense” 306–08). 138 On the parallels between a social and legal scandal and a narrative one, see Whitmarsh, “Birth” 115–18, citing Cave 14. 139 For a more skeptical view, see Heiserman, Novel 202; Hunter, “Aithiopika” 58. The way Sisimithres overcomes Hydaspes aligns with scenes in the Alexander Romance wherein the Gymnosophists overcome the brutal Alexander; Morgan, “Heliodorus the Hellene” 274. 140 Earlier at 9.9.3–15, Heliodorus mentioned the allegorical interpretations of the myth of Isis and Osiris and broke off at 9.10.1 in an Herodotean manner, although there is nothing particuarly unknown here. This is part of his Herodotean historiographical pose, as well as a fgure for the fantasy that such real mysteries actually existed; Morgan, “History” 234. 141 On whether her dream occurred on the same night as Hydaspes’ dream, see Morgan, “History” 244 and 250. 142 Note in that play Iphigeneia thinks she will marry Achilles—Theagenes’ ancestor. 143 Whitmarsh, “Birth” 115. On how the later scene echoes the novel’s opening scene, see Morgan, “Narrative Doublets” 71.

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144 Whitmarsh, “Birth” 114, citing Goldhill, Poet’s Voice 56. 145 Temmerman 294–98; Morgan, “Sense” 318. 146 The burning pyre and the burning grid are an important doublet, which Heliodorus goes out of his way to emphasize; Morgan, “Narrative Doublets” 68–69. 147 On the lack of logic here see Hefti 90 ff. 148 See Whitmarsh, “Birth,” 111–12, who cites Hom. Od. 19.389–91. 149 On Charikleia’s possible embarrassment, see Anderson, “ΣΩΦΡΟΣΥΝΗ” 320. This scene also refers back to Persinna’s own moment of self-exposure when describing how Hydaspes summoned her for sex. 150 An example of the logos eschēmatismenos; Morgan, “Discours” 57–61; Temmerman 296–98. 151 This odd sequence probably alludes to the lengths emperors went to pacify the populace. Notice that Hydaspes does not even bother asking Theagenes if he wants to fght; why otherwise would he want to put Theagenes at risk? 152 When Charikles arrives in Memphis, Kalasiris is dead, but supposedly Thyamis told him all that he knew. It appears that Charikles knows about Charikleia’s real parents, for “he suppressed the full truth of Charikleia’s origins, for he had no wish to attract the hostility of her true parents if she had in fact disappeared during her fight southwards before ever reaching Meroe” (10.36.1). Sisimithres had told him he had picked up the child in Ethiopia, so Charikles could logically see there was a possibility that Charikleia’s parents still lived in Ethiopia; Charikleia and Theagenes might not have wanted to share the full account of Charikleia’s origins with Thyamis, who may have told Charikles all he knew (their trip to Ethiopia), but not the full story. Further, Charikles might have been so blinded by anger at Theagenes he might well have discounted much of the full story Thyamis told him, especially if it excused Theagenes and Kalasiris; see Kruchió; also Morgan, “History” 257. 153 Heliodorus mentions how the army cheered their approval of this speech and “clapped their hands in wondrous applause” (10.41.1). I suspect this refects the power of the army as emperor makers in late antiquity. 154 Morgan, “Heliodorus the Hellene” 269. Note that in the Delphic procession Charikleia’s carriage is also drawn by two white bullocks (3.3).

6

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon

Introduction As noted, ideal elements can occur in very non-ideal narratives, often as an ironic contrast to the central narrative’s sordid events. The next two chapters will concern Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon (L & K) and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. L & K details how the erotic protagonists end up reproducing behaviors of more ideal erotic protagonists despite a cultural background and paideia that encourages rather non-ideal behavior. But the extent to which Kleitophon ever substantially reforms remains questionable as well as whether he obtained the canonical happy ending. Apuleius’ even more sardonic Metamorphoses presents the coming-of-age story of an even more problematical aristocratic protagonist set within a world hellish on both the earthly and cosmic levels, whose deluded and desire-stroked idealizations of sex and magic lead Lucius to a disastrous loss of identity. He both hears and endures a series of horrid, traumatizing events that break him so that, surrendering his Greek homeland and the better aspects of his curiosity and joy of life, he can successfully, with dutiful, ass-like obedience, serve Isis and Rome, both only ftfully moral. There the brightness of Lucius’ delusive ideals makes the satire only more darkly bitter.

Some background1 Little is known securely about Achilles Tatius, who probably lived in Alexandria, possibly as a Roman citizen, writing in the latter part of the second century CE.2 Like Longus, he innovated by developing potentials within the romance genre while utilizing numerous elements common to Second Sophistic literary practice. L & K, the least ideal of the “ideal” Greek romances, has been thought a parody of the genre, at points recalling Petronius’ Satyrica.3 Contrast it with Daphnis and Chloe (D & C); the former has protagonists who recall marvelous children, stresses childhood innocence and the life of the lowly, has no real journeys and at best small-scale adventures, posits a close communion of the human and the divine and provides a happy ending that points toward a continuation of the benefcent state DOI: 10.4324/9781003036647-6

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through the central couple’s children. The latter has rather sophisticated, if not profigate, elite urban protagonists who undertake a long journey and endure rather grotesque adventures. The hero, often less than honest, commits a serious breach of fdelity toward his beloved Leukippe, as well as toward Melite who rescued him and respected her rival. What divine apparatus exists has an ironic cast, and the abrupt conclusion, along with the hero’s initial woeful appearance, makes the reader wonder if Kleitophon has enjoyed any substantial happy ending. As Reardon notes, for L & K, “no uncontested interpretation exists” (“Achilles” 80). I think that, whether intentionally or not (I believe intentionally), L & K virtually deconstructs D & C.4 In both romances, an erotically minded sophist, the frame narrator, sees a painted image and then encounters a speaker who provides an erotic story that expands upon the painting. Both narrators are unreliable, either because they do not fully comprehend the story told to them or because their own prejudices jar with elements of the story. Both narrators compose their complex and playful narratives out of fragments and allusions to many genres. Longus and Heliodorus create hybridizing texts in which varied, often iconic, elements work together in relative harmony. In contrast, Achilles Tatius’ frame narrator, Kleitophon or maybe both create a complex hybrid text, whose pieces do not work together nearly so smoothly. Further, while Kleitophon possesses considerable powers of observation concerning matters exterior and interior, he manifests a naïveté that suggests that he has not been able to process the information gained through paideia and experience into any unifed whole. Such jarring contradictions and lapses, and ironic references to greater systems of meaning (myth, religion and philosophy), together with Kleitophon’s Phoenician ethnicity and the text’s failure to signal that anything more than an entertaining story is being provided, increase the sense of reading a contrived story lacking anything as edifying as D & C. Questions about Kleitophon’s sorrows stir up a σμῆνος λόγων (a “bee-swarm of stories”),5 including the implicit novella of Melite and Thersandros, plus the myths of Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx, Procne, Philomela and Tereus, Heracles and Prometheus, Andromeda and Perseus as well as Artemis, Aphrodite, Eros and Euthynikos and Rhodopis and more, with the novella of Kallisthenes and Kalligone perhaps offering an alternative (and maybe better) way to conduct love than the principals fnd. Kleitophon has gained experience and endured myth-like adventures, but possesses no sure universal knowledge, such as Odysseus acquired. Unlike the male protagonists of other novels, and more like the New Comic protagonist, whose sexual aggressions get a young woman in trouble, and who, with the help of a clever slave, makes it all right (mostly), there is nothing exceptional about Kleitophon, who, like Petronius’ Encolpius, thinks of himself as being in a hybrid of tragedy and ideal novel (Morgan, “Erotika” 185). He instead recalls a character in an ill-ftting hybrid of New Comedy, tragedy and declamation. L & K also purposefully recalls mime and pantomime, genres flled

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon 207 with comic or lurid episodes (Mignogna, “Narrativa” 232–42). Kleitophon’s sufferings, like those of Apuleius’ Lucius, have brought him to a problematical ending and have given him many interesting stories to narrate. The work’s ideal potential is indicated by legends making Achilles Tatius a bishop and Leukippe and Kleitophon the parents of the martyr St. Galaction.6 Goldhill (Foucault’s Virginity 100–02) states that a “central move” in a “moralizing” reading of Achilles Tatius is “policing the digressive turn,” as epitomized by epigram Anth. Gr. 9.203, which suggests the reader who desires to remain sōphrōn should not focus too closely on the episodes but concentrate on the outcome. Morales considers the ideal and pro-traditional values reading of L & K is based upon a privileging of the novel’s ending over the adventures, the sententiae and digressions, items that present a more ambivalent story (Introduction viii–xxvi). Such privileging recalls New Comedy, where the fnal marriage, symbolic of the renewal of society, justifes the protagonists’ problematical behavior. Like Apuleius, Achilles Tatius plays off ideal expectations, intent on keeping the reader perpetually wavering between the parodic subversions of the genre and elements that allow more ideal readings, although by no means any “panegyric of chastity” (Gaselee xi). For me, the way Achilles Tatius exposes how the fctional sausage gets made implies that the ideal exists only as a creation of fction, not as something existing or truly potential in the real world. Using D & C to read L & K, one notes how D & C’s frame narrator was hunting, fguring aggressive erotic activity, when he came upon the painting, being clearly interested in erotic concerns; similarly, L & K’s initial narrator, an admitted erotikos, has been preserved from a storm at sea, the storm-world symbolizing the violent environment the narrator inhabits. He subsequently makes a dedication to Astarte, an eastern goddess of love and confict, appropriate for this storm-world. While viewing the city (recalling Kleitophon’s future tourism at Alexandria), he comes upon the picture of Europa and the bull.7 Here, L & K subverts D & C; instead of hearing a narrative that leads him to comprise a story providing paradigmatic advice about love, L & K provides an aporetic tale that highlights the impossibility of drawing certain conclusions. The frame narrator’s elaborate rhetorical description displays an interest in female beauty such as Kleitophon himself displays later.8 The beauty of the maidens is linked to the terror they are experiencing, a prelude to many such depictions, which attempt to render even the most horrid violence (especially as visited on women) as an aesthetically pleasing experience. Apuleius will take this process further. This aligns with how Kleitophon tends to use references to artworks to explain his thoughts and experiences (Repath, “Cleitophon” 51; Morgan, “Kleitophon” 113–14). The frame narrator is particularly impressed with the portrayal of Eros’ cosmic power, and the narrator’s reaction, “To think that a child can have such power over heaven and earth and sea” (1.2.1), which recalls Petron. Sat. 83.9 Like Kleitophon, the narrator has been motivated by love and probably by its traumas, which would connect to Kleitophon’s response: “How

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well I know it—for all the indignities Love has made me suffer.” (1.2).10 The frame narrator’s reference to Kleitophon’s initiation into the cult of Eros (1.2.2) echoes religious language Kleitophon will use later, another suspicious similarity of mindsets (Bartsch, Decoding 50). Longus’ Eros makes a mythos about superior love out of Chloe (2.27), while Kleitophon declares his adventures are like mythoi (1.2.2),11 recalling Daphnis and Chloe’s confusion about Philetas’ tale (2.7). The erotically minded frame narrator relishes the prospect of being told a myth-like tale and invites Kleitophon to mythologize further (1.2.2). Jones (“Lover”) posits that the frame narrator identifes with painting’s gardener who is using a mattock to open a channel for the garden, symbolic of the narrator’s servitium amoris. D & C’s four-part formal garden that Daphnis helps clean up, watered by “Daphnis’ spring,” fgures a type of more innocent love, which the meadow of the mattock-user recalls. Not only do important scenes occur in the garden of Kleitophon’s home, but Leukippe and Melite are often described in terms of fowers and vegetation (1.4.2, 1.19.1, 2.1.3 and 5.13.2), especially the “meadow of her [Leukippe’s] face” (1.19.1–3), comparisons seen in other novels and school exercises (Temmerman 199). Similar references to natural wonders, especially manifestations of love in the world of animal, plants and even minerals (magnets!), while recommended by Ovid, Menander Rhetor and others as tools for seduction,12 also connect to a serious tradition of using animals for insights into human sex and marriage, often implying love arising from nature, not sophistry.13 The garden (and the irrigator) and Zeus and Europa can fgure how D & C’s more pastoral, organic way of love is supplanted by seduction and abduction in L & K. Kleitophon corresponds to aretalogoi who declared the true miracles of the deity and were known for entertaining stories (Edsall 120–21). Yet note the difference with this uncertain Kleitophon and that earlier self who constantly made learned digressions and pronounced various gnomic statements on love.14 Kleitophon’s uncertain attitude and situation support Chew’s (“Novelistic Convention”) opinion that Achilles Tatius (and Kleitophon) has made Tychē, not Eros, the initiator and central motivator of Kleitophon’s relationship with Leukippe, unlike in Chariton where Aphrodite is able to overrule Tychē.15 We cannot know why Kleitophon is in Sidon; as with Kalasiris’ narrative to Knemon, Kleitophon may need to process what has been (or is still) happening to him—which aligns with the lack of return to the frame narrative.16 In a dream, a fgure of Aphrodite promised that Kleitophon would become her priest (4.1); is Kleitophon here as part of those duties? Doubtful, but then what is the upshot of the promise of his priesthood? Instead of giving closure, readers are invited to write their own conclusions to the erotic careers of Leukippe and Kleitophon.17 The frame narrator leads Kleitophon to a grove that, with its ice-cold water, plane trees and bench, refects the cooler, more objective setting of a philosophical discourse, another ironic use of a familiar trope.18 Kleitophon will likewise invest his tale with such ironized Platonica.19 The novel is a kind of anti-Phaedrus of a Plato eroticus.20 While Kleitophon’s subsequent

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon 209 autobiographical novel is a performance aligned with Second Sophistic display and he is something of a sophistic voyeur,21 L & K can also be viewed as one long character study.22 Everything Kleitophon sees, thinks and does appears infused with the devices of sophistry;23 most of the major characters have part-time careers as sophists,24 practices which have distorted love and other personal relations. Kleitophon’s digressions and sententiae align with his status as sophistic narrator,25 who produces for the needs of the moment (Morgan, “Kleitophon” 116–17). Kleitophon poses himself as alternatively clueless and expert, putting a more positive spin on some of these actions while also willing to admit more regrettable behavior. Kleitophon has been viewed as a “bundle of neuroses,” especially in reference to father fgures, and belabored by guilt (Zeitlin, “Gendered Ambiguities” 121 and n. 36). Kleitophon seems always aware that he is giving a performance (Morales, Vision 60–77), sometimes providing descriptions of what he could not possibly know,26 giving contradictory evidence about himself, resorting to spin (e.g., the story he tells to Leukippe’s father in Ephesus) and often appearing blind to the meaning of events he has narrated. L & K’s references to divine activity also appear ironic.27 Achilles Tatius also delights in the motif of doubleness, from double-hued seas to Perseus’ sword which has a double form (Mignogna, “Roman” 27; Morales, Vision 43), constantly presenting items able to be more than one thing, which possess different names, or which can be judged by more than one perspective.28 Morgan correctly sees in L & K the work of a hidden narrator who has so set up his story that many readers will adopt a critical and even skeptical attitude to the truth value of the narration, that we cannot ever be sure what in fact the narrator knows.29 Indeed, one can posit that the story that the “real” Kleitophon told was rather like the story that the unnamed exegete told Longus’ frame narrator, which was radically embellished. Achilles Tatius also undermines any stable sense of Greek centrality; Kleitophon begins his story with the following words: “I was born in Tyre in Phoenicia.” Phoenicians were proverbial for lies and exaggeration, had a reputation for sexual excess and were depicted as barbarous in other novels; Phoinikika could be a byword for luridly pornographic tales.30 Note that both D & C and L & K start with the mention of a city, but one is canonically Greek (Miletus) and the other canonically not Greek (Sidon). Although his main characters, albeit Phoenicians, seem quite Greek, his ethnicity signals that Kleitophon will present a different set of perspectives that often jar with established conventions. Note that Kleitophon tells a story of how Dionysos frst revealed wine to the Tyrians, a story later adapted to Greek myth, which has overtones of the Christian Eucharist (2.2).31

Archetypal patterns The archetypal patterns and familiar plot elements seen before appear, along with elements of parody and irony. L & K is the protagonists’ comingof-age story. As does Leukippe, Kleitophon belongs to a leading family of

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his city; Kleitophon impresses the general Charmides with his skill with horses (3.14.2), and he is given a tent and orderly, but nothing comes of it, again in contrast to Kallisthenes, who also trained more as a game (8.17.8–9) but gained skills useful in the Thracian war. Here, too, the protagonists must pay for the transgression of defying parental authority but fnally rejoin legitimate society. Their story’s beginning recalls the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden; note Kleitophon’s opening seduction maneuvers occur in his family’s lavish garden. They have violated the word of the parents about sex, with Kleitophon being guilty of acts of seduction and near-rape. The initial dream of Leukippe’s mother underscores how this error will motivate much of the coming plot; the bandit who inserts a sword into her genitals is clearly Kleitophon (2.23.3), and how he rips her apart preludes the various forms of mutilation, real or symbolic, which Leukippe will suffer (Zeitlin, “Gendered Ambiguities” 110). At the same time, the untested Kleitophon at some level identifes with Leukippe’s vulnerabilities and the tortures and threats she undergoes. This accords with how the comingof-age protagonists are vulnerable and fuid in their identities during their trials (Ballengee), as well as how the protagonists come to recognize an inner purity that they must try to maintain. The dramatic arc begins with Pantheia’s violent dream, which has similar themes to the episode in which D & C’s Lycaenion made Daphnis recognize the bloodshed Chloe will endure in sex (3.20.1–2), as well as the dream of Heliodorus’ Thyamis who interprets the declaration that he will slay and not slay his guest to refer to sex. Kleitophon will pay the price for his attempt, and Leukippe for not understanding what she was allowing him to ruin.32 The tale of the discovery of purple dye (2.11.4), the death of Kleinias’ boyfriend, and the remorse Pan feels over chopping up Syrinx likewise connects sex, violence and regret. However, only such a permeable and vulnerable body permits a proper communication between inner and outer worlds of mind and experience; an Odysseus learns much because he suffers much (Zeitlin, “Gendered Ambiguities” 115–19). L & K adventures, tasteless, excessive and stylized as they are (possibly recalling Lollianus),33 its scenes of mutilation, slavery, madness, murder, mistaken identity, and confusion generated by the narrative’s embedded sophistries conforms nicely with the requirements of descent into Frye’s lower world, where traditionally violence, loss of self, madness and confusion reign and nothing is quite what it appears. There the pair will be tested, beginning with crossing over water by boat and the ensuing storm and shipwreck. L & K shares with Apuleius’ Metamorphoses a graphic depiction of how illicit sex brings destruction and an erotization of death, all aspects of the world Lucius and Kleitophon are (sort of) saved from. The three false deaths and resurrections of Leukippe are part of this underworld pattern, as is the presence of doublets and mistaken identity.34 Note how Milete claimed to be haunted by two corpses, those of Thersandros and Leukippe (5.26). There is also a central demonic trial, ending in a marvelous

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon 211 resurrection (Leukippe’s) as there was in Callirhoe. They are saved by divine interventions, including a parent sent to rescue them from this virtual Hades. As in Heliodorus’ Aithiopika and later Christian romances, such a world provides the opportunity for Kleitophon and especially Leukippe to show that unbreakable will to virtue which so attracted the writer of Anth. Gr. 9.203. Kleitophon’s claim to Leukippe that he is a kind of parthenos (5.20.5; also 8.5.7) demonstrates his acceptance of an ideal of integrity, however fawed his performance. As he erotically hunted the parthenos Leukippe, so he is in turn hunted by Melite, by whom he seems strangely feminized,35 and like a novelistic heroine, he tries to put off sex to preserve his chastity—until he does not (Brethes, “How” 133–44). Kleitophon may be technically a moichos but, like Daphnis (and like Callirhoe), after Leukippe’s frst false death, he never loses his basic loyalty to her, as shown by his willingness to die for Leukippe’s suffering. Frye’s comic paradigm is likewise central. Kleitophon is not an exemplar of sōphrosynē like Theagenes, but he and Leukippe are somewhat comic characters who succeed because they have “desired rightly” in the sense of “fnally having proved themselves able to desire the right thing”—which does not exclude them from enacting shockingly improper desires. But his brief inclination to restraint (see below) and the fear he shows on entering Leukippe’s room suggest a better side to Kleitophon,36 even before the events at Ephesus.

Kleitophon and Leukippe and their problematical drama of desire L & K concerns itself extensively with desire and its pathologies, with constant references to the arousal and frustration of desire. Kleitophon resembles Apuleius’ Lucius as one whose desires, senses, imagination and education have overwhelmed his ability to properly order their input. Kleitophon as narrator takes particular pains to analyze vision itself (Morales, Vision 130–42), since it moves him so greatly (vision being a principle Platonic path to the Good, but also to varied forms of desire). While Daphnis and Chloe’s love is connected platonically to each other’s beauty, and as Daphnis devours Chloe with his eyes, so does Kleitophon (Morales, Vision 165–67), who is also far more obsessed with the physical aspects of sex than any other ideal protagonist. He initially aims at having sex, not marriage, not even sure if Leukippe will respond to him (1.9.5; Temmerman 155–66). Kleitophon falls in thunderstruck love with Leukippe at frst sight (1.4), a vision that presses his soul even in his dreams, allowing possible illicit telocopulation (1.9.4). He dines mostly by gazing on Leukippe, going to bed “tipsy with love” (1.6), and for the next three days, he walks around fnding opportunities to glance at Leukippe, until “drenched” with desire; afterward, he goes to Kleinias, who stresses his good fortune in continually seeing his beloved (1.9).37 As noted, Leukippe’s name recalls the Phaedrean

212 Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon better “white horse” who assists the soul charioteer.38 Notice that while Heliodorus’ Theagenes cannot initially recognize Charikleia disguised as a beggar and even hits her (7.75–77), Kleitophon is immediately shaken by the resemblance the slave Lakaina—dirty, with a shaven head and whipped body (5.17)—has to the supposedly dead Leukippe, whose ideal form seems etched on Kleitophon’s problematical soul. And yet vision can fail; when Kleitophon comes to Alexandria, he is so stunned by the sight that he must confess: “Eyes, we have met our match” (1.1), and his subsequent description of Alexandria mostly stresses its impression on him, not extant details. There are other idealizing notes. Menelaus’ comments about the two types of beauty, pandēmon and uranion (2.36), although defending homosexual love, in their echoes of Pausanias’ two Aphrodites (Pl. Symp. 180d) hint at a more spiritualized Aphrodisian love. Kleitophon presents impressive philosophic and medical disquisitions on love, such as on the connection between sight and love (1.4) and on the kiss (2.8). Kleinias declares that love is self-taught and that a lover will know what to do automatically (1.10.1); Satyros assures Kleitophon that Love will dictate his letter to Leukippe (5.20.4); Kleitophon’s slavish description of the garden and disquisition on Love’s universal power, which works in the realms of waters, minerals and plants, suggests that a human-like erōs pervades the natural world (1.16–18), allowing a possible Daphnis and Chloe-style approach to love in conformity with nature, rather than as seduction and combat, as I noted in the earlier discussion of the opening ekphrasis. Both D & C and L & K also underscore the potential for violence and oppression in the male’s relationship with the female; according to Kleitophon, Eros causes a venomous snake to remove its own poison (1.18.4–5) alluding to a provident Eros which, as it transforms ferce and quite opposite kinds of animals such as eels and vipers into proper lovers of each other, will transform them too. The episode of jailhouse sex presents evocations of mystery religion (6.26), and Melite successfully philosophizes, taught by Eros (5.27.1), who helps them improvise intercourse on the jailhouse foor (5.27.4), recalling, ironically, Diotima’s speech in the Symposium, with Eros as the ultimate improviser and sophist (Pl. Symp. 203d; Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity 78). As in D & C, L & K’s ideal (implied and ironized) love story presents Love as a fundamental, ennobling force within the world which leads the protagonists from their original condition of sophisticated ignorance to a proper sōphrosynē, a more mature Eros and the assumption of adult roles and responsibilities, and concerns itself with the purposeful teaching and learning of love and its habits and the problem of fnding correct sources for such knowledge (Morgan, “Erotika” 178–80). Longus’ narrator declares his whole literary offering to be didactic; in marked contrast, Kleitophon, Kleinias and Charmides practice an Ovidian ars amatoria, casting Eros as a sophist in their own image. Thus, the dramatic arc of L & K’s ideal romantic narrative concerns how Leukippe and especially Kleitophon manage to act like proper and devoted lovers, despite a cynical sophistication that would degrade true love and a

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon 213 rhetorical inculcation that renders it diffcult for the pepaideumenos to see, think or speak naturally. Thersandros, the chief villain, recalls Chariton’s Dionysius, being called “the noblest born of the Ionians” (6.12.2; Temmerman 155), but also as habitually violent,39 with a similarly violent henchman in Sosthenes, who, like Dionysius’ bailiff, tells his master of the heroine’s beauties (6.3). Leukippe herself does not fall in love at frst sight, and Kleitophon’s consultation with Kleinias portends a story of seduction and perhaps tragedy, as suggested by the death of Kleinias’ boyfriend. Kleitophon has been compelled to love, as Eros compelled Habrocomes to love (Xen. Ephes. 1.4), but Kleitophon makes aggressive choices that the more erotically passive Habrocomes does not; in fact, his initial plans for sex with Leukippe are formulated when he still is scheduled to marry Kalligone and he never thinks of actually marrying Leukippe (Montiglio, “Erotic Desire” 224). Satyros (a speaking name) had described the projected conquest of Leukippe with military metaphors (2.4.5) which Kleitophon briefy echoed (2.5.1), depicting his restraint as cowardice before deciding to retain sōphrosynē (especially in regard to his father’s will [2.5.1]),40 but he soon seems to change his mind when “the voice of Eros replied from deep down in my [Kleitophon’s] heart,” telling him that such insubordinate resistance was pointless (2.5.2). Earlier at the symposium, Apollo’s love for Daphne furnished a literary–cultural model for his abandonment of sōphrosynē, (1.5.6; Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity 73–74; Brethes, “Clitophon” 186). Kleitophon is completely oblivious to the implications of Daphne’s terrible fate (Morales, Vision 178); accordingly, this myth foreshadows Kleitophon’s attempted seduction and the ensuing agonies and transformations Leukippe will experience for Kleitophon, and maybe also suggests an ultimate failure. Kleitophon utilizes two expert praeceptores amoris: frst, Satyros, who engineers the means to his erotic ends, and second, Kleinias, more experienced than Kleitophon who prefers boy-love and is a slave to erotic pleasure (δοῦλός ἐστιν ἐρωτικῆς ἡδονῆς [1.7.2]); nevertheless, he plays the advisory role that Philetas and Kalasiris perform in D & C (Whitmarsh, “Reading” 196–97). Kleitophon seems to accept Kleinias’ notion that women want to seem to be forced (1.10.6), and it is unclear how welcoming Kleitophon’s initial advances are (Temmerman 194). Further, there are many references to moicheia (15) and moichos (25) connected with Kleitophon,41 standing in contrast to the abundant references to Leukippe as parthenos and her partheneia,42 and also the fact that she is aligned, like Charikleia, to Artemis (4.14–5, 7.13.2, 7.15.2 and 8.9.13). While a more radical conversion to virginity takes place in Leukippe, Kleitophon never shakes his moichos aura. Nor do we ever see a moment when Leukippe and Kleitophon are working as one inspired mind, as when Daphnis and Chloe, without rehearsal, reenact the myth of Syrinx. Note, too, all the positive things Kallisthenes in contrast does to prove himself to abducted Kalligone. It will take suffering and, more importantly, the experience of how Leukippe has suffered on his behalf, for Kleitophon to move beyond that initial selfshness.

214 Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon Assessing Leukippe’s character is diffcult, because it is fltered through the often self-serving narrative of Kleitophon, who sees her frst as a willing partner in his seduction and later like the more virtuous heroine of erotic romance.43 As Morales notes, “a major motivating force of Achilles’ narrative is to discover the body of Leukippe” (Vision 156). Romances frequently possess “light” and “dark” heroines (Frye, Secular Scripture 83; Segal, “Trials” 83). Leukippe mediates between these two poles, being a relatively “light” heroine as compared to Melite, but a somewhat “darker” heroine when compared to Kalligone (Temmerman 188–89). Leukippe holds within herself the potentials of Artemis and Aphrodite, both chastity and impurity, and even recalls the Gorgon with her beauty’s ability to stun men (Morales, Vision 159–60). This ambivalence is marked early, as Leukippe is compared to Selene. Further, L & K also posits a kind of cooperation between Artemis and Aphrodite, implying, especially through the vindication of Leukippe and Melite (and, by implication, of Kleitophon [Segal, “Trials” 83–91]), that sexual propriety is much more complicated a matter than defned by conventional morality. The Greek Artemis was traditionally the protectress of young unmarried girls, yet Ephesian Artemis was almost certainly a version of an eastern fertility goddess. L & K begins with a focus on Astarte/ Aphrodite and ends with the couple’s triumph at the shrine of Artemis, whose works the people bless (7.16.1). Correspondingly, Leukippe’s personality, actions and transgressions make her a realistically engaging character. Leukippe has quite considerable paideia, being a skilled musician (2.1) and learned enough to appreciate Kleitophon’s rhetoric-driven erotic pursuit. She is strong-willed, is proud (as is Callirhoe) and, unlike Callirhoe and Anthia, seems willing to be seduced.44 There is little indication that her initial feelings for Kleitophon are particularly deep; her self-exile seems as much about adolescent rebellion as love, a realistic touch.45 The oppressiveness of her mother is indicated by her name Pantheia (“All-Seeing”) who has aptly named servant in Conops (“All-Eye”), a true polupragmōn; after their interrupted assignation, Leukippe mostly wants to escape her mother’s gaze (2.30.1; Morales, Vision 85–86). The contrast with protagonists’ escape in Heliodorus is noticeable. Yet the real shame Leukippe feels at her mother’s accusations indicates a capacity to appreciate the values inherent in chastity and marriage, which will appear when Leukippe realizes the seriousness of what she has done. But, considering her mother’s proleptic dream, her three false deaths, the pertinent images of Andromeda, Prometheus (maybe), Procne and Philomela, Syrinx, Rhodopis, the threats posed by Charmides, Gorgias, Chaireas and Thersandros, and her personal sufferings as Lakaina, plus Kleitophon’s own fantasies (Apollo and Daphne), her function is to suffer either in displaced form or in reality, fguring an essential element of most romances, how the heroine must pay for her beauty for falling in love outside parental approval. Leukippe, like other women (but not men!), is compared to an animal, especially one that can be tamed (1.9.6). Note how Kalligone, who is unwillingly abducted, and whose abductor works tirelessly to obtain parental consent, does not suffer so.

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon 215 Another set of trials for romantic heroines concerns public exposure, and the text equates Leukippe with the phoenix, especially how it dies and is reborn and must undergo a public test regarding its sexuality by a priest (Morales, Vision 191–96). Rude ethnic stereotypes about Phoenician sexual practices hang over Leukippe, and she is clearly subject to embarrassing sexual revelations, as when she exposes herself in a ft of madness (4.17.5–6), which comes after the description of the massive mouths of the hippopotamus (4.2) and crocodile (4.19.5) which permit a view into hidden parts (Ballengee 153–54). Desire wounds and disrupts the psyche; Leukippe’s madness due to an overdose of love-potion renders this metaphor as a bodily experience and her self-exposure foreshadows, like the description of the phoenix’s inspection, the coming virginity test. Further, the frst test is connected with the phoenix honoring its father, and Leukippe’s virginity test will occur in the presence of her father, and rebound to his honor, for this virginity test arises from accusations of publicly suspect behavior, plus her capture by pirates. The trials connected with her frst false death may prompt Leukippe’s dream in which Artemis commends chastity until marriage (4.1.4; Lalanne 146–49). After her second false death, resurrection and transformation into abused slave, her defance of Thersandros recalls Christian martyrs.46 Like Callirhoe, Leukippe faces huge tests, but paradoxically both women become more devoted to their somewhat problematical partner. Later, the vindicated Leukippe, no longer observing customary aidos, shows pity for the murdered prostitute (8.16), a similar broadening of moral sensibilities.

Novella of Kallisthenes L & K contains novellas and myths that situate Kleitophon’s and Leukippe’s romance as just one possible love story to demonstrate love’s complexity, just as other ideal novels have subplots showing positive (Leucon and Rhode in Xenophon of Ephesus) or negative (Hippothoos and Hyperanthes in Xenophon of Ephesus) amatory relationships. The novella of Kallisthenes and Kalligone furnishes a narrative of more ideal love (Repath, “Callisthenes”; Morales, Vision 88–94). Kallisthenes appears a young reprobate of degraded repute, a New Comic akolastos, who, falling in love with Leukippe by rumor alone, illustrates the Lacanian notion that the true object of our desires is projected phantasia. Kallisthenes’ abduction of Kalligone is mirrored in many details by Leukippe’s abduction by Chaireas, who comes to a bad end.47 He also, like Hippothoos and Thyamis, fts the mold of aristocrat turned bandit, although without a proper excuse. Like Habrocomes and Kleitophon, he seems compelled by Eros to transgressive behavior, but then recognizing his error, he respects Kalligone’s virginity and reforms himself, becoming a model of social respectability, who practices public benefactions including aid to the poor. He would rise when elders approach, and would call Sostratos “father” and be his escort, all compensation for Kallisthenes’ initial violation of the word of the father. Further, he proves himself and benefts his homeland in war, as did Chariton’s Chaereas, becoming a

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co-commander in a war whose success is connected with the appearance of a goddess traditionally concerned with chastity. Note how he is compared to the reformed Themistokles. He shares with Kleitophon the ability to be persuasive (8.17.4), but his words are backed up by deeds and events, and it appears that Kallisthenes and Kalligone endure no serious trials. His story, told by Leukippe’s father at the novel’s end, upstages her story. Indeed, Sostratos publicly declares that he began to regret that he told Kallisthenes to “go to blazes” when he proposed marriage with Leukippe (8.17), implying Kallisthenes might have been the better match!

Novella of Melite The implicit novella of Melite demonstrates further, in its virtual commentary/deconstruction of Callirhoe and D & C, that the processes and moralities of love are unfgurable, often misaligned with conventional morality. Just as Daphnis’ education in love must negotiate the conficting demands of love fgured by nymphs, Pan and Eros, so Kleitophon must negotiate the messier dimensions of the erotic as fgured by Artemis, Aphrodite, Eros and Pan, plus various mythical fgures. As Lycaenion evoked the nymphs, so Melite invokes Eros, and both women can be seen as servants of the erotic gods,48 even in their supposed ethical lapses. Melite is the only woman in the text referred to as an agalma (5.11.5), probably being the dream woman resembling Aphrodite who promised that, if Kleitophon would only wait a bit longer, she would make him a priest of the goddess Aphrodite (4.1). As S. Bartsch suggests, Kleitophon is disturbed because Leukippe’s dream implies that his being made a priest of Aphrodite is not going to be done at Leukippe’s hands, as Daphnis’ sexual education was carried out by Lycaenion who claimed guidance from the nymphs (Bartsch, Decoding 91–92). Leukippe’s dream mentions Kleitophon and marriage, but his dream does not mention Leukippe. Instead, Melite later seeks sexual initiation by Kleitophon in a scene evoking Eros and mystery religion.49 But initiations in L & K are often connected to degradation and psychic violence, fgured and augmented by physical violence. Thus, when Thersandros beats him, Kleitophon describes the ordeal in terms of a mystery religion.50 He later allows Leukippe’s father to pummel him (7.15). I argue that Kleitophon, in his supposed “initiation” of Melite, is instead being initiated by Melite, who deceives him as Lycaenion deceived Daphnis, or Aphrodite deceived Anchises, teaching him the mysteries of a pandemic, amoral and often brutal Aphrodite, who used Eros to compel Euthynikos to transgressive love. This Eros forcefully compelled Kleitophon and Kallisthenes to transgression and seemingly spoke from the bottom of Kleitophon’s heart counseling against resistance (2.5.2); at 7.26, Melite asks Kleitophon if he can hear Eros speaking through her, a parallel scene. Yet the way Kleitophon’s actions with Melite echo those of Thersandros with Leukippe,51 as well as how Kleitophon portrays himself as moved by Melite’s evocations of mystery religion and philosophy and by a fear of

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon 217 Love’s vengeance, suggests some agency on the part of Kleitophon, who provides himself a rhetorical cover for his betrayal of Leukippe. Melite recalls the transgressive Ismenadora of Plutarch’s Erotikos (Amatorius), a rich, experienced widow who masters a younger man fulflling the purposes of Eros. Melite has treated Kleitophon as a man treats a woman— gazing at him consumptively, pestering him for sex, using rhetoric for seduction and fnally taking advantage of his desperate situation.52 Since Melite, not Leukippe, will make Kleitophon a priest of Aphrodite, Melite will have “bragging rights” over Kleitophon; Lycaenion asserts similar rights over Daphnis (D & C 3.19). Having sex with Melite, despite all the fne words, was a morally problematical, reckless choice for Kleitophon. Melite’s treatment of Kleitophon, implicitly threatening his masculine and erotic authority, impairs his ability to recognize her fundamental goodness, demonstrated by her actions toward Leukippe. Kleitophon’s sense of betraying Leukippe and distrust of Melite become imaginatively actualized in the story of how Melite had Leukippe murdered, in turn activating Kleitophon’s guilty, self-condemning response. As noted, Daphnis chooses to delay sex out of fear of hurting Chloe, while Kleitophon chose to betray both Melite and Leukippe. As Habrocomes, who willingly gives in to Cyno, is sentenced to death for his supposed murder, so Kleitophon will be sentenced to death for his murder of Leukippe. Lycaenion pitied the naïve couple and even showed up at their wedding with her partner Chromis. There is no evidence of Kleitophon’s further contact with Melite after the trial or any apologies to her. Yet it is conceivable that Melite’s philosophizing in part refected her own amatory evolution and that, once Thersandros is expelled, better days await her. Leukippe can be justifably sure of vindication by the virginity test. Melite’s confdence that virgin Artemis will vindicate her ties in with her status as a knowing servant of an amoral Aphrodite with whom Artemis can cooperate. The story of Melite and Thersandros (“Beast Man”)53 presents a demonic doublet of the love of Dionysius (vicious in his own cultivated way) and Callirhoe, whose Chaereas also gave into anger and violence. The marriage of Thersandros and Melite suggests a sad story of an ideal heroine married to a very unideal man (Segal, “Trials” 83–91). Callirhoe approaches this; Chaereas kicks Callirhoe into a coma and loses her, for a while, to Dionysius, who is in many ways a better husband. But during their separation, Chaereas reforms and wins battles through which he reclaims her, although Callirhoe at the end remains ambivalent about their future, as Kleitophon appears at Sidon. Thersandros suffers a commonplace false death, and one assumes he had adventures after his shipwreck. Like Chaereas, Thersandros discovers his spouse is alive and married to another man. Both Thersandros and Dionysius try to force a woman, who is married (or virtually so) to another and has been reduced to slavery, using problematical slaves. Thersandros and Chaereas pay for their transgressions as their wives have sex with other men. As Dionysius loses Callirhoe in the aftermath of a trial, so

218 Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon Thersandros loses Leukippe. Both trials feature an unexpected resurrection of one thought dead. Thersandros pays for his violence with social disgrace and exile, while Dionysius lives ignorant of his enduring humiliation.

Alternative love in the myths As did D & C, L & K presents several myths refecting on love in general and protagonists’ relationship in particular. The myth of Euthydikos and Rhodopis, Daphne and Apollo, as well as Eros’ “voice” speaking angrily to Kleitophon and Melite’s later invocation, shows Eros and Aphrodite promoting transgressive, dangerous love. The Ephesian virginity test suggests some cooperation between Artemis and Aphrodite, perhaps connected with Artemis’ regret at her angry destruction of Rhodopis (Segal, “Trials” 83– 91). While Kleitophon worries about Leukippe’s safety in the realm of such a lustful being (8.13.2–3), Pan’s pipes vindicate her virginity. Note how in the origin story Pan “bewails the cutting, thinking he had cut up his beloved” (ἔκλαε τὴν τομήν, νομίζων τετμηκέναι τὴν ἐρωμένην; my trans. [8.6.9]).54 These two myths suggest a greater complexity of divine attitudes which becomes instrumental in the acquittals of Leukippe and Melite and which leads to Thersandros’ condemnation and open a path for principals’ transgressive elopement to become legitimate marriage. Having survived their frst shipwreck, the couple came to the sanctuary of Zeus Kasios, like Kleitophon, a hybrid of Eastern and Greek elements, who recalled Apollo (Kleitophon’s behavioral exemplar) and was a protector of travelers.55 They pray for an oracle and immediately see kindred (adelphai [3.6.4]) paintings of Perseus and Andromeda and Prometheus and Heracles. Unusually, both paintings are declared to be signed by Euanthes.56 Bartsch (Decoding 55–62) claims that the two paintings (3.6–8) refer to Leukippe’s upcoming pseudo-sacrifce; a consideration of archetypal patterns suggests a better interpretation. As noted, their voyage over the sea and shipwreck signaled their entry into the nether world of testing. The oracle of Zeus Kasios, through the two paintings, is actually predicting something about to happen to them. In the Aithiopika, a myth tells how Andromeda’s parents sacrifce Andromeda, as Hydaspes (nearly) sacrifces Charikleia. Its painting captures the moment that Andromeda is released from her chains. Both Theagenes and Kleitophon liberate their beloved from parental control.57 The statue’s pomegranate, with its numerous seeds and bloodred fruit, is a very old symbol of fertility, marriage and the underworld.58 Thus, it fgures the death, resurrection and marriage of Leukippe. Further, Prometheus defes the will of a father fgure (Zeus), stealing something tied to forbidden knowledge (fre, females, sex). The eagle eats his liver, symbolic of Prometheus’ passion, certainly a problem for Kleitophon. The eagle (Zeus’ bird) also symbolizes the guilt and punishment connected with his disobedience of the father. The manner in which the eagle penetrates his innards

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon 219 recalls Kleitophon’s frequent expressions of penetrative erotic wounding; the fascination Prometheus seems to have with his wound mirrors Kleitophon’s fascination with his own internal psychic disruptions. Through the intervention of Hercules, Prometheus and Zeus are reconciled, which involves Zeus making a sexual concession concerning Thetis. What allows Kleitophon to be reconciled is how his father, whose word he had violated, now concedes a marriage with Leukippe to him, ending Kleitophon’s passionate torment. Hercules is often associated with Melqart, a major god of Tyre (a.k.a. Ba’al Ṣūr) where Kleitophon’s father comes from. I agree that the violence of the two paintings may obliquely refer to Leukippe’s coming pseudo-sacrifce, but one image can refer to two or more situations, and Kleitophon resembles the tormented Prometheus better than Leukippe. Consider, too, how the story of Hercules arises from the story of his ancestor Perseus, and thus, these two paintings might refer to the beginning of their adventures (when Kleitophon “steals” Leukippe from her father) and the end (when Kleitophon learns of his father’s permission to marry Leukippe). Thus interpreted, these two myths better contextualize the erotic drama of Leukippe and Kleitophon. There is another ekphrastic doublet. The general Charmides falls in love at frst sight with Leukippe (4.2.1), as did Kleitophon, and shortly after, as Kleitophon described natural erotic wonders to entice Leukippe, so Charmides discourses about the hippopotamus and elephant (4.2.5; Leven; Morales, Vision 197–99). Note that “hippopotamus” recalls “horse,” as does “Leukippe.” The sexualized monstrosity of the hippo fgures how Leukippe is a formidable erotic monster for Charmides to hunt and catch; this recalls how the violent myths that Daphnis narrates (such as the myth of Echo) fgure his own fears regarding Chloe’s power over him. Similarly, I suggest that in Charmides’ second narrative (also highly sexualized), the elephant denotes Kleitophon (4.4.1–4). As Leven notes, Plato’s Charmides tells how Socrates, on military leave, chats up the beautiful Charmides about sōphrosynē, also using imagery of hunting animal prey (Chrm. 155d), as well as mentioning the need of a charlatan doctor with exotic knowledge to cure a young man of a headache (157a–b). Correspondingly, Charmides tells how the elephant allows a human to stick his head into his gaping mouth for a fee to cure a headache, which brings up the paradox of how such an ugly animal could have such beauty inside, recalling the paradox of the ugly Socrates having a beautiful soul (Pl. Symp. 215). This is maybe a fgure for Kleitophon, who will “cure” Melite, like a “charlatan doctor.” The elephant’s benefcent properties arise from eating the famous “black rose.” We have earlier seen Leukippe compared to a meadow and fowers59 and noted the references to how (albeit visually) Kleitophon consumes her. Thus, the reason for Kleitophon’s eventual positive inner qualities, for a certain sōphrosynē, is the spiritual and emotional sustenance Leukippe grants him. Thus, Charmides’ digression on the hippopotamus fgures Leukippe as the fearful object of

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an erotic hunt, while the elephant digression fgures Kleitophon as both enticing and dangerous to women, but whose sōphrosynē is increased by his contact, through sight and sound, with them. Later, the painting of Philomela and Procne, seen in an artist’s studio (5.3),60 also foreshadows violence to Leukippe (Morales, Vision 178–80; Konstan 69), as well as her relative silencing;61 I suggest the text presents a more positive partial evocation of that myth. As Daphnis narrated to Chloe a positive version of the Echo myth, so Kleitophon explains the deeds of Tereus.62 This myth anticipates the violent acts of Thersandros, who abducts Leukippe as Tereus abducted Philomela; Tereus claimed Philomela was dead, as Thersandros will make Kleitophon think that Leukippe is dead. It is hard to equate Kleitophon with Procne, but note how Leukippe and Melite working together will ruin Thersandros, causing him to lose his social form, as Philomela and Procne ruin Tereus who likewise loses his physical form. Here, Achilles Tatius gives a happier ending, for Melite and Leukippe will also lose their prior form (one as a woman badly married, the second as a persecuted virgin), but only to gain a better one. And, as these birds still enact this terrible story in the natural world, Melite, Leukippe and Thersandros will perpetually enact their story through the medium of Kleitophon’s tale.

The political unconscious The fact that Alexandria exists in all its glory dates the text to no earlier than the late Hellenistic period. The references to a satrap (4.11.1 and 4.14.4), which must be the Roman governor, suggest Roman times. The mention of the Thracian wars, and the supposed arrival of the phoenix,63 can place the setting’s date around 47 CE (Plepelits, “Achilles” 408–11). Yet, except for these mentions, the Romans are invisible. Even the soldiers Kleitophon meets seem securely Greek, although some also seem to be carrying the larger Roman shields (3.14), and it is known that Roman troops were used to contain Egyptian unrest. The invisibility of the Romans can be connected to how even L & K’s native Phoenicians seem Greek—only the herdsmen of the Delta are evidently non-Greek-speaking Egyptians. Yet, as noted, here is a Hellenism not always subservient to Greek perspectives. Achilles Tatius was probably from Alexandria, as Kleitophon’s praise of the city suggests, which can be contrasted with the lack of description given to Ephesus, whose temple to Ephesian Artemis was one of the wonders of the iconic Greek world. Like Apuleius’ Lucius, the protagonists, when forced to face the realities of slavery, may show some pity for its victims, but they show no sense that the overall system is wrong. Likewise, there is no idealization of any political formation. Just as its cultural fantasy washes away sharp differences between different Hellenophone populations, so its implicit politics accepts unproblematically the status quo, although the boukoloi, rendered

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon 221 ideologically as simple brigands and not refecting a broader resistance to offcial authority, evoke historically real problems of the later second century.64 L & K has one of the longest trial scenes of the novels where the rhetoric of both sides presents ideals of justice and images of its corruption (Schwartz, Courtroom Scenes 185–226). But any sense of justice done through legal proceedings is undercut: frst, due to the over-the-top sexual invective used, and second, because justice is done only due to events, perhaps divinely guided, occurring outside the courtroom, not to mention that Kleitophon is technically guilty of adultery.65 Note how in Callirhoe, Chaereas is saved from his self-condemnation by Hermocrates, but Kleinias offers no such help; instead, Kleitophon is condemned to death by the president of the judges, who belonged to the royal family.66

A drama in four stages Within the elements discussed above, an ironized ideal love story can be constructed. The opening ekphrasis suggests that Kleitophon played the role of an aggressive abductor humbled by Eros like Zeus was, with Leukippe a not unwilling Europa. As D & C’s inserted myths portray the egoistic, repressive male sexual aggression that Daphnis ameliorates, so Kleitophon and Leukippe produce a comic, transgressive history of love more relatable to average persons than the traditional Zeus–Europa abduction/rape myth, one telling of a couple whose cultural milieu has made ideal love near-impossible, but who somehow end up producing the characteristic achievements of other ideal protagonists. L & K shows Kleitophon undergoing initiation into the messy world of Aphrodisian love as embodied by Melite, but which Leukippe and her mentor Artemis also participate in, to which the romance of Kallisthenes and Kalligone present a more ideal alternative. I give this drama four stages. Stage one The frst stage sets up the couple’s frst love and the errors that produce their wanderings and sufferings, and also suggests divine operations behind this drama. Kleitophon, the sophistic sensualist, falls deeply in love and struggles between passion and morality, ignoring indicators such as the death of Kleinias’ boyfriend67 and accepting the tactical erotology of Kleinias and Satyros by producing sophistries to align his predatory actions with Apollo and Eros. Kleitophon is something of a snake in the Edenic garden tempting Leukippe with exciting new knowledge of good, evil and pleasure. Kleitophon’s planned seduction, with Leukippe willing to be seduced, is a substantial affront to familial control and family repute,68 a critical lapse which leads to their self-expulsion from the safety of their quasi-Edenic home into the “lower world” of adventures and testing.

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Stage two The couple’s trials begin with storm and shipwreck and culminate in Leukippe’s pseudo-disembowelment, Kleitophon’s thoughts of suicide (3.16), Leukippe’s “resurrection” and, most importantly, their twin dreams pointing toward their futures (4.1). A socioreligious ritual is performed by the bandits to initiate new members into their society, one based upon the display, violation, consumption and complete erasure of a woman. There Leukippe suffers the ultimate symbolic penetration in a theatrical act of ritual cannibalism,69 a gross extension of the male’s consumptive gaze. This deeply traumatic episode leads to a personal transformation for which Leukippe’s death and resurrection is a metaphor. Leukippe has given up nearly everything for Kleitophon, a sacrifce that needs meaningful sanction. Virginity and its protectress, Artemis, and marriage become newly important for her. Thus, when subsequently Kleitophon suggests sex, Leukippe describes a dream from Artemis ordering her to keep herself chaste and declaring they would be married in time; note that, signaling a change in attitudes, she declares: “Of course I was upset at the postponement but very glad of our expectations” (4.14; Montiglio, “Erotic Desire” 226). Kleitophon suddenly remembers his own dream. Such congruent dreams signal that their amatory careers, like those of Theagenes and Charikleia, are under divine supervision, although not in a straightforward manner, since, as noted, the Aphrodite image seems to refer to Melite, who will initiate Kleitophon into the morally messy fundamentals of Aphrodisian love. Still, Kleitophon shows something of a new attitude; from this point onward, and he no longer pressures Leukippe for sex. Stage three More development and maturation are needed. The second phase of their adventures culminates in Leukippe’s second false death and subsequent enslavement. These adventures further expose the couple to the dangers of aggressive eros, as Leukippe becomes the target of Charmides, Gorgias and Chaireas and suffers madness and its embarrassing results, kidnapping, a second false death, being sold into slavery, fairly brutal servitude, a displacement of self symbolized by Leukippe’s adoption of the name Lakaina and, fnally, seeing Kleitophon married to another woman. After a leap ahead to two months after Leukippe’s supposed death and Kleitophon’s reunion with Kleinias, the narrative has left the realm of adventures proper70 and returned to what resembles New Comedy with melodramatic overtones (Reardon, “Achilles” 90). Although he believes Leukippe is dead and has the rich and beautiful Melite wanting him, Kleitophon remains loyal to Leukippe. The sophistry Kleitophon employed to get Leukippe into bed is now used to avoid sexual intercourse with the frustrated Melite, who, seeking a love philter from Leukippe, reveals Kleitophon’s surprising loyalty. The

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon 223 arrival of the presumed dead romantic-demonic protagonist Thersandros sets in motion the complex quadruple conclusion. The crucial event is Kleitophon’s jailhouse sex with Melite, a mostly self-justifying expediency which represents a betrayal of Melite’s goodness, being also a lapse of loyalty to Leukippe, particularly when contrasted with her own defant bravery. For this lapse, Kleitophon must suffer in the last stage. Stage four The fourth stage begins with Kleitophon’s rearrest and Leukippe’s kidnapping by Thersandros. In contrast to Kleitophon’s inconsistency, Leukippe, threatened with rape or worse, demonstrates a greater moral fortitude during her forceful taunting of Thersandros (6.21). The end of this cycle of trials comes with Leukippe’s third false death and Kleitophon’s subsequent “confession” to complicity in her murder (7.7). This confession is markedly different from that of Chariton’s Chaereas (1.4.4). Kleitophon has not murdered Leukippe, but he has grounds to think that his disloyalty to her, committed by encouraging Melite, has contributed to her pitiful death. And, as noted, this false confession also represents a betrayal of Melite’s goodness, yet also allows Kleitophon’s problematic vindication. Kleitophon is sentenced to death, but frst stripped and strung up for torture. Changes of fortune follow quickly. An epiphany of Artemis gave the Byzantines victory, and thus, they sent to Ephesus an embassy led by Sostratos, to whom Artemis has sent a dream predicting his daughter’s recovery (7.12). His arrival commences the restorative ending. While Kleitophon guiltily submits himself to Sostratos’ blows, Kleinias remains confdent of Sostratos’ dream oracle, and immediately afterward, an attendant announces that Leukippe has taken refuge in the temple of Artemis; the crowd subsequently bless Artemis’ name (7.16.1; Edsall 119–21). The salvationist marvels are undercut by near slapstick (8.1). At the banquet afterward, the general mood was embarrassment (8.1) until, help being provided by Dionysos, the Aristophanizing priest suggests that Sostratos tell his story (a mythos), which he does, before asking Kleitophon to tell the couple’s stories, which likewise are described as mythoi. As Hermocrates told Chaereas not to admit any embarrassing details, so Sostratos asks that all be disclosed, for a god (a.k.a. Artemis) was responsible. Kleitophon admits (to us) he omitted his now-discharged obligation to Melite. He shows the scar on his leg, recalling Odysseus’ disclosure, who likewise probably hid some of his dealings with Calypso from Penelope. Accordingly, Kleitophon claims that they behaved like brother and sister, keeping themselves chaste until they could be wed with a father present (8.5). The amazed priest offers an explanation of the upcoming virginity test as a recompense, implying that both tales of erotic transgression which manifest divine workings. The priest’s tale of Pan and Syrinx is similar to Longus’ in its themes of a return to a primal time, the rehabilitation of Pan and a youth’s sexual initiation. In D & C, Philetas’ pipes look like the

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primal pipes; L & K’s cave contains those pipes. In D & C, Daphnis’ musical mime of a less violent Pan, accompanied by Chloe’s dance, earns him those pipes and status as Philetas’ successor in music and myth-making. Here, Pan’s pipes will establish Leukippe as a proven erotic heroine, as the fery Merotic grate established Charikleia. The pact that Pan, the regretful rapist, makes with Artemis connects with D & C’s themes regarding how the hero must subordinate his Pan-potential to the demands of virginity. The way Pan is depicted kissing the cut-up reeds as if they were the girl’s wounds (8.10.6) echoes how Kleitophon kisses the beheaded body of Leukippe (5.7.9) and keeps us mindful of the violence done by regretful males (Morales, Vision 181). The arrangement Artemis makes after her involvement with Aphrodite fgures an awareness, seen in other novels, that chastity can take surprising forms. The next day’s trial is flled with three speeches parodically crammed with sexual invective, along with priest’s statement that the God has saved both protagonists (8.9.13), followed by Thersandros’ challenges. The tests, which both women easily pass, are given a religious frame, shown particularly by Leukippe’s costume (8.13), and we recall Charikleia’s costume at a similar moment. Melite’s confdence and her vindication with Leukippe establish her standing as servant of love’s morally problematic gods. Sosthenes’ arrest prompts Thersandros’ fight (8.14). Other novels often disclose the happy fates of secondary characters. Melite may now have the freedom to fnd her own happy ending. The ending’s anagnōrisis, Thersandros’ expulsion and (eventually) a double marriage present an essentially comic conclusion, which often concerns the breaking of unjust laws and the recognition of truth, which leads to a new form of society as epitomized by marriage. Thersandros embodies the powerful, violent and hypocritical dominant masculine authority, which particularly penalizes the young and female, and his expulsion represents the rejection of its power. But the novel’s fnal paragraphs present one more turn. I have shown that D & C’s Chloe will retain an infuential (if obscured) voice. Here, the vindicated Leukippe tells her own story (mythoi, according to Sostratos), showing an expansive compassion and describing the pitiful fate of the prostitute and the deserved fate of Chaireas. But note the interesting timing of the next story; as Leukippe fnishes, Sostratos declares: “I [the father!] don’t want to be left out of the storytelling entirely” (8.17.1). Then, he narrates what happened to Kallisthenes and Kalligone,71 whose relationship, although begun in transgression, benefted the larger community, confrmed the word of the father and involved a chaste Artemis more than a messy Aphrodite. A fnal irony: in the other ideal novels, the principals’ love has improved other characters, such as Hippothoos, Thyamis and Lycaenion. But consider here how the actions of Kallisthenes, co-commander in a war won by an epiphany of Artemis, cause the Byzantines to send an embassy to Ephesus headed by Leukippe’s father who saves the day. As noted, Sostratos even begins to regret that he told Kallisthenes, seeking marriage

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon 225 with Leukippe, to “go to blazes” (8.17). And thus, this ideal and patriphilic love story upstages the story of Kleitophon and Leukippe. At the novel’s conclusion, the question remains: what role Kleitophon was supposed to play as promised “priest” of Aphrodite? Longus’ Daphnis earns the right to be Philetas’ successor and later educates Chloe regarding myth and especially sex. Here, recall Leukippe’s more expansive behavior and pity for the murdered prostitute, a fgure for what might have happened to her, and the ability her father recognizes for Leukippe to tell her own mythoi, as Kleitophon told his. The novel’s short concluding paragraph likewise does not stress Leukippe learning anything further important from Kleitophon; it was the trying adventures her relationship with Kleitophon caused which taught her much, and only accidentally Kleitophon himself.

Summary L & K’s basic perspective is comic-realistic-sardonic, its ideal elements reminding readers of how far the world falls short of what they desire. Following the comic paradigm, the machinery and divinities behind love are able to make Leukippe and Kleitophon, whose paideia seems to make natural and honest expressions of love near-impossible, produce behaviors (especially in Leukippe) more characteristic of ideal erotic protagonists, although the path involves moral messiness on the human and divine level. But that very moral messiness, the chaotic forces associated with desire and Eros and the ambiguity of novel’s beginning and ending raise serious doubts about whether any lasting happy ending could have been achieved by the couple, particularly when contrasted with the story of Kallisthenes and Kalligone. This fact, coupled with the way Achilles Tatius combines diverse materials to stress his narrative as a fction created for entertainment, and not pointing to any deeper truths or achieving any effect of the real, implicitly relegates the ideal to the realm of entertaining fantasy, not to any possible Not Yet.

Notes 1 I use the Greek text of Vilborg and, as a translation, Winkler, Leukippe. 2 On Achilles Tatius’ identity, see Plepelits, “Achilles” 387–416; Chew, “Achilles Tatius, Sophistic Master” 62–65; Hilton, “Contemporary Elements” 102. 3 On L & K as parody, see Rattenbury; Durham; Chew, “Achilles Tatius and Parody”; Fusillo, Romanzo 98–109. 4 Often L & K is dated before D & C but, as I note, the way L & K seems to engage D & C seems too detailed to be accidental. L & K also displays a far less sense of a secure imperial order than in D & C, which also argues for a later date. 5 Recalling Pl. Resp. 450b; see Morales, Vision 51. 6 MacAlister 110–11; Morales, Introduction xxx–xxxii. 7 On how this ekphrasis trickily foreshadows the subsequent narrative, see Bartsch, Decoding 14–32, 41–50 and 63–65; Harlan 56–59. Nakatani argues that since Zeus and Europa’s story parallels that of Leukippe and Kleitophon, the

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fact that they were united and had children suggests that Kleitophon enjoyed his happy ending; also Morales, Vision 138–42. Note how the narrator luxuriates over Europa’s quasi-nudity and her terror, just as Kleitophon later points out the transparency of the chained Andromeda’s gown (3.7.5) and the raped Philomela trying to cover herself (5.3.6); on approaching the novel as a voyeuristic polypragmōn, see Morales, Vision 87. On the Satyrica and Achilles Tatius, see Anderson, “Achilles” 190–93; Morgan, “Kleitophon” 111. Note that the speech of Lysias, which Phaedrus has with him, and Socrates’ frst speech both posit a speaker suffering with pains of desire, as is Kleitophon. Temmerman 160; Morales, Vision 53–54; Briand 165–68. Later (8.4.2–4), the priest wants to hear of Sostratos’ mythoi, and Sostratos, in turn, asks Kleitophon not to be shy, but tell his mythoi. Leukippe’s own story is a mythos (8.15.4); see Morgan, “Kleitophon” 112–13. For example, Ov. ars. am. 1.219–28; Morales, Vision 42–43 and 185–89; Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity 86–87. See Plutarch’s On the Love of Offspring, On the Intelligence of Animals and On the Fact that Beasts Are Rational; also see Jazdzewska. I agree with Most (“Stranger’s Stratagem”) that Kleitophon is posed as one about to tell a woeful tale. To give two examples, Kleitophon, describing the beginning of their affair, which was due to a war, often the product of Tychē/Fortuna, declares: “Fortune began her drama” (1.3); even Melite suggests that the reunion of Leukippe and Kleitophon is the result of “Fortune’s generous moods” (5.26.9); see also 1.9, 4.12–13 and 6.3. On Kleitophon’s eagerness to tell his story, not yet fully processed, see Repath, “Achilles” 261 and “Cleitophon”; Jones Playing 44. On the interpretive problem of the incomplete ending, see Reardon, “Achilles” 89–91; Morgan “Kleitophon”; Whitmarsh, Narrative 77–85; Morales, Vision 144–45; Brethes, “Clitophon” 191; Nimis, “Memory”; Fusillo, “How” 219–21. Kleitophon’s prayer (8.19.3), that Kallisthenes and his marriage be protected with good fortunes, recalls Callirhoe’s prayer for happiness at Callirhoe’s conclusion, leaving open a tragic possibility; see Repath, “Achilles” 264. Martin, “Good Place” 147–48. Apuleius also gives the tale of Aristomenes’ horrid death such a Phaedrean setting. Kleitophon, Gorgias and Charmides are all characters in Plato, and Leukippe’s name recalls the Phaedrean “white horse”; Morales, Vision 66–67. Kleitophon’s dream of being split apart from a woman recalls Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium; Melite’s comments on Kleitophon’s unwillingness to consummate their marriage (5.22.5) alludes to Alcibiades’ remark on how he rose from sleeping with Socrates as if “from a eunuch.” See Anderson, Eros 25; also Martin, “Good Place” 147–48. Marinčič 170; Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity 73; Konstan 65. Temmerman 153, citing Jones, Playing 70–72; Marinčič 194. Morgan (“Erotika” 18) considers that Kleitophon’s thoughts betray their origins in “book-learning, recycled experience, empty rhetorical commonplace”; also see Anderson, “Perspectives” 2291. Consider Melite’s sophistic orations to win over Kleitophon, Menelaus’ rant against women (2.36 ff.) and the deliberations over the oracle’s meaning (2.14). The lament of Kleinias and the boy’s father over Charikles (1.13–14) is presented as a rhetorical competition; see Anderson, Eros 26; Morales, Vision 201. Morales views L & K’s numerous digressions as part of Achilles Tatius’ strategy of postponing and even thwarting the fulfllment of the reader’s desire;

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sometimes, when readers expect revealing personal or interior detail, they are frustrated by a more abstract essay; for example, when Thersandros becomes angry at the resistant Leukippe, Kleitophon presents us with an excursus on the nature of erōs and thumos (6.19; Morales, Vision 17–121 and 143–51). Reardon, “Achilles” 85. Morgan suggests such details are provided by Achilles the “hidden author” to indicate Kleitophon as an unreliable narrator (“Kleitophon” 116–17); also see Repath, “Cleitophon.” However, Achilles Tatius is often careful about such irregularities; see Most, “Stranger’s Stratagem” 114. L & K 1.2.2, 1.7.1, 1.9.7, 2.19.1, 5.15.6 and 5.26.3. See Mignogna, “Europa” 178–79; Morales, Vision 38–42; Repath, “Cleitophon” 51–52; Elsner; Bartsch, Decoding 48–51. Like Plepelits (Leukippe), I think that Selene, which has more manuscript support, is the lectio diffcilior, and would agree with other signals that Kleitophon’s tale presents an eccentric Hellenism and intends this evocation of Selene to jar against the earlier reading of Europa. Also, Leukippe is often aligned with Artemis, who can be identifed with Selene. Bartsch considers that the opening ekphrasis leads the reader to misleading frst assumptions (Decoding 50–59); also see Nakatani; Morales, Vision 37. Morgan, “Kleitophon” and “Erotika” 180; Whitmarsh, “Reading.” Morales, Vision 48–50; Kuch 218; Temmerman 155. See Friesen; Bowersock, Fiction 126; Winkler, Leucippe 192, n.25. Achilles Tatius echoes eucharistic language such as in Mark 14:22–25, but instead of a ritual bringing a new relationship with God, implying a greater chastity of body and soul, this wine drinking inspires desiring gazes in both Kleitophon and Leukippe (2.3.3). Morales (Vision 212) suggests that Leukippe’s willingness to have sex and subsequent experience undercuts her status as parthenos. I would argue that Leukippe evolves into a parthenos in mind as well as body, because she fnally understands and strives for the purity of intent characteristic of true partheneia. Zeitlin notes how Christians, as well as Aelius Aristides, posited a possible restoration of a corrupted body, even in this life (“Gendered Ambiguities” 119, n. 31). As Chloe to some extent is identifed with Phatta, Syrinx, Pitys and Echo and must avoid their fates, so Leukippe’s lurid adventures likewise mirror the histories of Europa, Andromeda and even Philomela. Excessive sex and violence, plus references to the boukoloi, a cannibalistic ritual and perhaps even the prison sex scene, have their equivalents in Lollianus’ Phoinikika and Iamblichus’ Babyloniaka, although there is no proof of a dependent relationship; see Kanavou, “Iamblichos’ Babyloniaka” 109–31; Sandy, “Notes.” For example, when Kalligone, mistaken for Leukippe, is kidnapped, Kleitophon thinks Leukippe has been beheaded, and laments over what he believes is her headless corpse, and later, Leukippe assumed the slave name Lakaina. Kleitophon constantly misperforms ideologies of gender; see Jones, Playing 10– 11. He will compare himself with the cross-dressing Hercules (2.6.2), and Melite will compare him to a cross-dressing Achilles (6.1) and to a woman, a eunuch and a man-woman (5.28.8); when Thersandros captures him, he compares him to a cross-dressing bacchant (6.5.1). As Temmerman notes (173–74), the reference to the unprepared and hesitant Kleitophon as Odysseus (2.23.2) is ironic. On the help Satyros provides, see 2.10.1, 2.10.3, 2.10.5, 2.30.1 and 2.31.1. Recall how Kallisthenes falls in love with what he imagines Leukippe looked like from her description; see Goldhill, “Erotic Experience” 377–78. Candidus, Lucius’ Phaedrean white horse, also plays an important symbolic role in the Metamorphoses. 5.23.5–7, 5.26.5, 6.18.5–6, 6.20.1, 8.2.1 and 8.2.3.

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40 On an understandable reluctance to marry one’s half sister, see Whitmarsh, Narrative 163–64. 41 See Schwartz, “Clitophon” 104. Kleitophon is also designated a pornos (8.10.9); on Kleitophon as a prostitute, see Jones, Playing 243–51; Temmerman 169–70. 42 Temmerman 170 and n. 67; Kasprzyk, “Morale” 111–12. 43 Morgan (“Kleitophon” 116–19) suggests her letter to Kleitophon (5.18.2–6), in which her central concern is getting home, shows her real feelings, but this is before she learns from Melite herself of Kleitophon’s surprising loyalty. 44 Kleitophon woos Leukippe within an erotic garden, similar to the garden in which Europa played prior to her abduction; walled gardens as symbolic of the female body are a common trope, all elements suggesting Leukippe’s receptiveness to amatory activity; see Bartsch, Decoding 53–55. 45 Johne sees her fight as part of her decision to become an independent person (188). 46 For discussion, see Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity 117; Shaw, “Body” 269–71; Ramelli 86–90. Concerning similar scenes in Chariton, see also Temmerman 191. 47 The fact that the slave dealer who sells Leukippe has the same name as Kalligone’s abductor cannot be accidental. I do not think we are seriously meant to think that they are the same person (Repath, “Callisthenes” 110–24). Rather, Repath’s Kallisthenes#2 is one of those demonic doublets. Kallisthenes#1 got Kalligone through abduction, and she turned his life around. Kallisthenes#2 also got through an almost identical abduction, but he simply sold her for hard cash. Yet note that Kallisthenes#1 and #2 both serve the purpose of Kleitophon’s story. Kallisthenes#1’s abduction gets Kalligone out of the way and in part of the process by which Leukippe’s father comes to Ephesus to save them; Kallisthenes#2 brings Leukippe to the estate where Kleitophon will fnd her alive. 48 Morgan (“Erotika” 181) posits Melite as a servant of Aphrodite who gives Kleitophon knowledge of sex as physical gratifcation, and also as a type of emotional interchange. 49 Bartsch, Decoding 91–92; Repath, “Clitophon” 61–63. 50 Although this scene of a “bedroom showdown” was a standard feature in mime and declamation; see Schwartz, “Clitophon” 99, citing Mignogna, “Mimo.” 51 Kleitophon claims to “cure” Melite; Kleitophon viewing Melite and Thersandros viewing Leukippe both see one who is “suffering some human feeling” (5.27.2 and 6.7.7); see Temmerman 168. 52 Various critics excuse Kleitophon; Rattenbury 69–70; Rojas Álvarez 89–90; Reardon, “Achilles” 88. 53 Note that in Callirhoe, the bandit chief is called Theron; see Morales, Vision 83. 54 Similarly, in D & C, Pan, who in the myths does terrible things to Echo and Syrinx, nevertheless becomes instrumental in helping the virtuous couple. Somewhat similarly, in Apulieus’ Cupid and Psyche, Pan is shown gently educating Echo (Met. 5.25). 55 Zeus Kasios was originally a Canaanite god (Ba’al Saphon) introduced into Egypt during the second intermediate period (1780–1560 BCE) which was later identifed with Zeus, with features recalling the Egyptian Harpocrates and the Greek Apollo; see Oliveira. 56 Euanthes is probably Achilles Tatius’ invention. McHugh notes various examples of euanthēs used in rhetorical treatises, particularly in Aelius Theon’s Prog. 119–20, recalling Platonic questions about the relationship of truth to art. 57 Morales (Vision 177) connects the unusually detailed description of Perseus’ sword to the equally detailed description of the fake sword used in Leukippe’s fake disemboweling, both weapons being part of an episode of averted female sacrifce.

Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon 229 58 This pomegranate fgures in the story of Persephone and Hades, and Pausanias (2.17.4) says there is something of a holy mystery about the pomegranate, which can also be associated with the birth of Attis. Pomegranates were held by Greek korai (e.g., the so-called Berlin Kore and the Pomegranate Kore), as well as by the small statue of Demeter Malophoros from Silenus. 59 Note how Leukippe sings in praise of the rose (2.1.2–3). Melite’s cheeks have the beauty of a rose (5.13.1). But also note the reference to “the fower of her [Philomela’s] speech” (5.5.4); see Leven 122. 60 Note that in the earlier ekphrasis, the painter Euanthes was named; similarly, the mention of the studio underscores the painting’s nature as a made thing, a fction. The fact that Tereus takes away “the fower of her speech” (5.5.4) may also evoke Eu-anthes; see McHugh 11–12. 61 For Philomela as a symbol of Leukippe, see Morales, Vision 201. 62 Although his comment claiming that “the sexual appetite of barbarian men is not satisfed by a single wife” (5.5.2) is ironic, he will have sex with Melite while betrothed to Leukippe, being himself a “barbarian” by Greek standards. 63 On possible political implication of the imagery of the phoenix, see Hilton, “Contemporary Elements” 109–11. 64 Hilton, “Contemporary Elements” 103, citing Alston; see also Brioso Sánchez. 65 Note how earlier Kleitophon had imagined a trial between his father and Eros, who uses all manner of illegal means to torment the judge and thus win (1.11.3). 66 Probably rather like the archōn basileus as a possible Roman offcial; see Hilton, “Contemporary Elements” 108. 67 The fact that Kleitophon goes in a hurry from the boy’s funeral to his seduction (1.15.1) reminds one of Apuleius’ Lucius, who, having received many warnings, nevertheless vigorously pursues his quest for knowledge of magic, with terrible consequences. 68 Note how once Leukippe’s father arrives in Ephesus, themes of social respectability are stressed, especially during the resumed trial and in the two ordeals. 69 Morales, Vision 167–69; Mignogna, “Leucippe.” 70 According to Sedelmeier’s analysis (113–14), Books 3 and 4 are primarily devoted to adventures, with Books 5 and 6 describing the Melite affair and Books 7 and 8 describing the trials and conclusions. 71 I do not think we are meant to think Sostratos’ account is mostly wrong, although Repath is correct that Achilles Tatius encourages an attitude of “trust no one” (“Callisthenes” 111–12).

7

Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

Introduction and some background1 But for you in this chapter on Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, I will provide a reading of this reworked Greekish production as a darkly comic (and philosophically enriched) satiric novel,2 which posits a generally hostile universe inhabited mostly by foolish, fawed (deranged, demonic) humans, without a stable form or event. A saving order is not found in magic or sex but in the worldly powers associated with Rome and divine powers associated with Isis, who work together and recruit the problematical aristocrat and scholasticus Lucius, psychologically lamed and tamed by his misadventures to be their obedient ass-lawyer-pastophor at Rome. Lucius gains a rich career of desire, personally and vicariously, though the tales, which take Lucius through disaster and suffering, to a possible happy(?) ending. I assume Lucius’ adventures are told from the older Lucius’ perspective, who like Thelyphron, entertains by offering himself as one to be mocked and pitied. The interpretation of this polyphonic and ironic Metamorphoses depends on its readers’ mindsets. I think in the Metamorphoses, the ideal exists primarily to be revealed to be delusive and destructive, deepening the sardonic bite, presenting a hell-world where chance events, lies and false assumptions produce terrible results, and normal moral concepts, such as pietas and fdes, have no force, with individuals increasingly described as animals (Shumate 108–09). Adapting Winkler (Auctor 125), I would call it “a satire-tinged comedy about the deluded possibility of a better life though amatory, religious, philosophical, cultural and political metamorphoses, transformations largely propelled by the forces of desire”; perhaps a suitable perspective on our messy world. The Metamorphoses reproduces many archetypal structures of the more ideal novel, particularly in the Cupid and Psyche fable, a fgure for Lucius’ deluded catastrophe. It spins themes of the destructive and seductive power of erotic desire, paideia’s false promises, misleading ideals of religion and philosophy, capricious divine orders, unreliable narrators, and destabilized reality, possessing also a signifcant political unconscious. Whereas L &K’s (Leukippe and Kleitophon) Kleitophon knows only that unpredictable love DOI: 10.4324/9781003036647-7

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brings suffering, Lucius likens himself to an Odysseus who has experienced much but become no wiser (9.13). The multinamed Isis fts the diversity of the Metamorphoses (Finkelpearl, Metamorphosis 32); more signifcant is how this Egyptian goddess commands a Romanized Hellene to go to work at Rome; recall Isis shrines and her worship were a prominent part of religious life at Rome (Bradley, Apuleius 230–32). The wealth and power (especially the military power) of the emperor, manifest all over the empire, also impressed Apuleius. The Plotina story, where the emperor’s mere will obliterate Haemus’ robber band, illustrates this power. The Metamorphoses, a sophist’s novel, uses elements taken from diverse genres,3 its own genre uncertain (Tatum, “Tales” 157), a hybrid Greek and Milesian4 tale rendered into Latin with an Egyptian infection. Apuleius plays various hermeneutic games and keeps the reader wondering about his novel’s seriousness, his playful revisions of canonical works displaying his mastery of “cultural capital” (Harrison, Apuleius 226). References to Milesian tales, a self-confessed ass-narrator, plus references to the intended reader’s enjoyment, partially undercuts claims to serious intentions. The narrator, a rudis locutor, produces a lepidus susurrus (1.1), softly uttered like a magic spell, more dulce than utile, that will lull the reader into a receptive state, which, as Lucius’ own auditory seduction through Aristomenes’ story shows, is dangerous, such as the Sirens’ songs (Graverini, Literature 14–36). It recalls a degenerate, even effeminate rhetoric designed to charm, to permulcere aures, not to teach.5 Similarly, the Metamorphoses’ posited reader, as implied by the prologue, Lucius himself, and various internal audiences, are fascinated by novelty, willing to be seduced, and, truth be told, something of a voyeur and sadist, like the audiences for the Thelyphron’s tale, for the Risus festival, or for the spectacles of the Corinthian arena. Belonging to the spoudaiogeloion tradition,6 the Metamorphoses’ robust comic elements and satiric perspective (with narrator as self-sabotaging moralist)7 do not negate the positive, the comic and serious being blended together, as in writers from Rabelais to Borges.8 But characters (and the reader) confront many ambiguities; not only does Lucius himself fnd the truth hard to determine but also characters and episodes are constantly upended by false or misleading perspectives. References to philosophy and religion provide frameworks to structure belief (including false belief) and experience. Since much of the narrative’s allusion to philosophical elements displays Apuleius’ erudition9 and entertains by its subversive use of philosophy,10 “serious concerns” arise which make the novel’s contrast between the ideal and real so stinging. Apuleius’ Apology and other works indicate that Apuleius was capable of considerable engagement with religious feelings, while being able to mercilessly mock the shortcomings of actual religious belief and practice. Accordingly, Apuleius channels the mind of a convert in the frst heady (if mistaken) days of salvation. Furthermore, the Metamorphoses, set in the Greco−Roman present, better exposes the political and

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ideological confict between the ideal dream and concrete, real, and hellish world, in which some deluded elites imagine this world is not so bad. Most scholars believe Apuleius promotes Rome and its imperium (Harrison, Apuleius), whereas others see a more critical stance owing to the Metamorphoses’ satirical nature and themes inherited from the Onos.11 Apuleius can hardly be thought of as anti-Roman;12 he was a sacerdos provinciae in Carthage, perhaps having a wider political career.13 Apuleius’ cultural attitudes would necessarily be complex and probably conficted (especially in terms of career—philosopher, sophist, or entertainer?), and he plays different roles for different audiences and contexts.14 Although he celebrates his abilities in Greek,15 Apuleius works largely within the Roman literary tradition,16 seeing himself, like Gellius and Fronto, a mediator between Roman and Greek worlds (mostly) in Rome’s service.17 There is a centerperiphery competition; just as Greek speakers outside mainland Greece snipe at Athens, Hellenism’s center, Apuleius sometimes proudly promotes local traditions. Before the Roman trial magistrate Apuleius did not mention his Roman citizenship and embraced a half-Numidian, half-Gaetulian identity (Apol. 24.1–3).18 He declares how his boyhood was shaped in Africa (Flor. 18.15), praises Carthage with reference to the Camena togatorum and Musa caelestis (Flor. 20), and claims to worship Aesculapius and all the gods of Carthage (18.36).19 References to items familiar only to Romans made when Lucius is supposedly hearing a Greek fable points to the novel’s overall constructiveness in a context of cultural appropriation and rivalry. Thus, Ionian Apollo, for the sake of the future narrator of a Milesian tale, gives his oracle in Latin (4.32), and Jupiter mentions the Julian law on adultery (6.22).20 Lucius’ career suggests the problems of the colonial subject and Graeculus who has worked hard to “Romanize” himself, being estranged from his Greek origins and yet also a marginalized Roman understanding the faws of rulers and ruled. Numerous questions arise regarding the relationship between the author Apuleius, the Metamorphoses’ prologue narrator, and Lucius, the internal narrator.21 I think that it is only at 1.2.1 (Thessaliam . . . petebam) that we can assume the Lucius actor is speaking,22 although I suspect many Roman era readers, like Augustine, thought Apuleius’ work was partially autobiographical.23 The frame narrator is a sort of alter ego for Apuleius,24 being a non-Roman trying to impress Romans, having a love of the comic, sardonic, sensual, and erotic. The frame narrator of L & K was clearly interested in hearing entertaining, erotic stories of the sort Kleitophon would tell, while the Metamorphoses’ frame narrator promises varied, entertaining, and even dangerously seductive series of tales told by the subsequent Lucius-narrator. I think fabulam graecanicam refers to the longer Onos that the Metamorphoses adapts, a revision which some readers would recognize.25 I agree with the consensus opinion that from the early mention of the “Nilotic reed,” Apuleius is preparing the reader for the surprise ending involving Isis, most likely a signifcant departure from his model.

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I take the fctional Prologue speaker as having revised the Onos, with his (also fctional) mature, more ironic Lucius both capturing the perspectives of Lucius’ earlier self, while also providing elements that refect Lucius’ later perspective.26 Tilg rightly posits that the concluding obibam aligns with sphragides seen in Ovid, Horace, and Propertius; the imperfect tense suggests a story still in progress. Lucius calls his time at Rome a peregrinatio (11.28) implying further moves ahead, as Odysseus will make one more journey after book 24.27 The Onos’ Lukios is a literary man, a suggrapheus (as was Chariton) of historia and other things, suggesting he is a writer of noncanonical prose works such as the Onos, the story of his own earlier adventures. The Metamorphoses’ frame narrator’s literary ancestry (Athenian Hymettus, Corinth and Spartan Taenarus, a vetus prosapia representing the fnest Greek lineages) conforms to that “kinship diplomacy” which Lucius himself practices as he declares his ancestry (2.1; Keulen, “Lucius’ Kinship Diplomacy”). Like Lucius, the frame narrator was educated at Athens and then, abandoning his considerable Hellenic background, moved to Rome. The strenuous efforts (aerumnabili labore) to succeed align with the ending’s studiorum meorum laboriosa doctrina, describing also Lucius’ own effort. The predictions that Lucius will write a famous novel are anticipations by the frame narrator that his adaptation will be popular. Lucius’ narrative after lector intende, rather like Kleitophon’s performance, is conceived as the written version of the performance of Lucius, the sophist, and a staged, theatrical quasi-multimedia experience at that.28 Like Kleitophon, Lucius, the unreliable narrator, is prone to recast his story in terms of tragedy or other genres, an even more determined and experienced sexual hunter/predator with an even greater taste for the perverse, as well as a hypocrite with moralizing tendencies. Apuleius’ narrative focuses on the knowledge and mental states of characters (Dowden, “Greek Novel”; Paardt, “Various Aspects”), presenting the disastrous conficts arising from the characters’ internal metamorphosis of reality. For example, Theron’s robber band, with their pompous speeches and heroic poses, imagine themselves as valiant military men but are revealed as bumblers. Lucius’ sufferings, amorality, hypocrisy, and genuine ability will gain him a position in the web of cosmic and Roman power.29 The prologue narrator’s declaration of a pan-Hellenic background, details about his move to Rome, and his mastery of Latin underscore issues of identity change and thus metamorphoses, including Lucius’ transformation into an Isis devotee and Roman careerist, events recalling the career many colonials pursued within the Roman Empire. Lucius recalls the ideal novel’s protagonist; his outward appearance testifes to his aristocratic rank (1.23 and 2.2),30 and he is apparently handsome and equipped with doctrina (3.15, 11.15 and 11.30). He has (like Apuleius) been initiated into several cults (3.15). His father’s name, Theseus, fts the mythical paradigm where the protagonist is the son of a king or god. It is unclear to what extent Lucius is Greek, having a Roman name, coming

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from a Roman colonia, with a mother named Salvia (2.3.2). The honors the Hypatans offer him correspond to the tribute given to a high Roman aristocrat.31 Lucius is morally problematical; he treats people who care for him (Byrrhaena, Pythias) as nuisances, and he is often quite manipulative.32 Lucius is notably carnal in respect to sex and food (even as an ass), his neardeath in an eating contest pointing to base preoccupations (1.18.8). There are indications of extravagant lifestyle, and he continues to dine lavishly at offcial Isis feasts (Tilg, “Religious Feasting”). Lucius recalls a crude, self-deluding scholasticus, sophist and tricky sham intellectual like Empedocles,33 too reliant on the senses (Keulen, “Comic Invention” 163–67) and too trusting of superfcial appearances (Shumate, Conversion 51–52).His pedantic tone (1.3.2–3) suggests the skeptical traveler is not smart enough to see what is possible, but Lucius’ own reactions are often misplaced; thus he calls Aristomenes’ story of Socrates’ death and personal exile a lepida fabula, one of several times Lucius does not see how a tale pertains to him. As with Kleitophon, Lucius’ paideia seems to have done him little good; thus, Mithras chastises him for how little his education has profted him (11.15.1). Yet he is also Odysseus-like in his cleverness and trickery, and, as seen in his extempore defense speech during the Risus festival and in his nearly hymnic prayers, he demonstrates a way with words, which will allow him later to serve Isis/Osiris.

Desire As noted, the Metamorphoses describes a far greater range of desires and their outcomes than the other extant novels, save perhaps Petronius’ Satyrica. According to Mithras, central to Lucius’ tragedy is his serviles voluptates, tied to his improspera curiositas. While Longus presents the ennobling powers of Eros, Apuleius shows the life crushing power of desires ranging from the positive, neutral, and common to the offcially transgressive to the polymorphously perverse. Lucius’ improper curiosity is linked to his longedfor ability to change into other selves, even to sexually “know” other selves. Note Lucius’ desires lead him to the bestial, as he contemplates a harem of mares at Charite’s farm (7.16). Thus, the novel offers an ideal, if ironic, outcome in that Lucius not only survives but also seems to succeed. The desires of Psyche, Lucius’ stand-in, undermines Cupid’s resolve and nearly destroys her. But Psyche triumphs too, becoming an Olympian goddess. Desire remains a central, usually deadly, propellant of the novel’s action with desire-corrupted judgment as a major motif.34 The generally baleful effects of desire explain Lucius hyperdutiful submission of his desires to Isis’ servitium. The curiositas of Lucius and other characters derives from intense desires for novelty, although Lucius’ curiositas35 is often more an urge to learn dirty secrets than philosophic knowledge.36 The initial story of Socrates and Meroe, the later Paris mime, and Lucius’ denunciation of the condemnation of Socrates underscore the weakness of the bonds of family, justice, and

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philosophy in the face of desire, a theme further stressed in the inserted stories. The Risus festival and the planned execution in the Corinth’s arena show that desire is also linked to a pleasure in seeing others humiliated and degraded. The mutilations, dismemberments, and falls into psychosis and metamorphoses can also fgure the self-fragmented by Desire’s compulsions. Indeed, Lucius’ unbridled desires have dangerously disordered his perceptions, thoughts, and actions. Thus, on his frst full day in Hypata, Lucius awakes full of desire to see things rara miraque. As Kleitophon became drunk with desire when constantly seeing Leukippe, Lucius becomes so constantly imagining the effects of magic. The story of Aristomenes racing through his mind, Lucius goes out into the Hypatan streets and caught up in desire he looks around and asserts: “Neither was there anything in that city which, looking at it, I could believe it was what it was, but everything, by savage enchantment, was changed into another form” (2.1). The Phaedrean Socrates valued mythoi only as keys to self-understanding; Lucius’ desire-warped sensibility loves the sort of exotic mythoi that Socrates rejected (Graverini, Literature 133–40). While Apuleius condemns false judgments, the greater problem is how sexual display and uncontrolled desire lead to those corrupt perspectives. His submission to the disciplines of Isis, in which Lucius will largely avoid such displays and restrict his desires, shows his grasp (at some level) of this truth. Lucius, who “desires to know nearly everything” (1.2), like the true Socrates, is on an (clearly ironized) search for truth; Lucius, like the young Telemachus, is making educational travels.37 Lucius seems the product of a culture even worse than that which produced Kleitophon, Gnathon, or Hypata’s sadistic crowds. Yet his pronounced learning and excessive desires also align him with Goethe’s Faustus, who also abandons academic learning and the legitimacy of his father’s reputation in his quest for extreme experiences that involvement in magic brings him. A form of Faustian illimitable desire goads Lucius the resourceful trickster. Consider how his fellow North African Augustine upon coming to Carthage, hating security, was also “in love with loving” (Conf. 3.1); does not this describe Lucius’ dangerous desire? God saves Goethe’s Faust because he never stops striving for what is beyond himself, and a much grosser version of such desires and ensuing salvation is obtained for Lucius. Plato posited that increasingly rarifed forms of desire raise the lover upward, and Lucius’ failed transformation into a bird parodies Phaedrus 251b regarding the soul growing wings. And does not, in an ironic way, Lucius’ desires prove superfcially transfgurative, leading him to a vision of a universal god, along with subsequent divine communications?

The archetypes, the myths and the arc of Lucius’ story The dramatic arc of Lucius’ story coheres as a satire-tinged dark comedy of a young man’s quest for knowledge, his dire fall due to personal shortcomings, his struggles and his fnal (problematical) salvation; this is essentially

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the Onos-plot, save Apuleius has complicated Lucius’ rescue from assdom.38 The Onos’ brief summary of how Lukios, fnally home, sacrifced to the savior gods may have inspired Lucius’ rescue by Isis.39 Until Book 11, the reader, especially one knowing the Greek prototype, observing Lucius and his misadventures, probably expected the Onos’ comic/sardonic conclusion, but in Book 11 Apuleius surprises by suggesting that, unlike in the Onos, there will be a true happy end; but when Lucius relocates to Rome, the prior realistic/satirical elements reemerge. The central archetypes are the protagonist’s coming of age/quest/initiation, his descent, Ascent and Assumption and his becoming consort of the goddess. Lucius’ quest is a search for true knowledge, a home in the world and a type of rebirth and transition with many missteps, as Jason and Aeneas make (Harrison, “From” 55). Note that he is reborn in Isis at Corinth, his birthplace, but soon leaves for Rome. As a result of his incorrect valuation of magic, his inability to heed strong warnings its dangers, and his affair with the possibly duplicitous Fotis, Lucius suffers that loss of self-common to underworld journeys. This quest/journey pattern is deeply informed by the complex of myths (including Euripides’ play) concerning Hippolytus, which fgures a problematical (and symbolic) confict between the father, mother, and hybrid son, one involving ways of knowing and relationships with mortal females and female divinities. There are episodes of struggle, death, and a fnal transformation/resurrection in Italy. The Cupid and Psyche myth, the full Charite-Tlepolemus complex, and the beginning of Lucius’ restoration to human form, which begins with the betrayal of the market gardener and service with the Roman legionary, provide a commentary on Lucius’ ideal hope for transformation and subsequent, less ideal, Isiac−Roman reality. Lucius’ time in the nether world of testing begins when he seeks entry into Milo’s house and fully ends with the return of his horse, Candidus. I agree with Bradley’s assessment of the Lucius of Book 11 as a different, I would say, traumatized and tamed, man (Apuleius 207–28). Various characters are seen as humiliated and broken, reduced to immobility and silence and exiled (Socrates, Aristomenes, Thelyphron), lameness being a constant theme (Lateiner, “Humiliation”). Considering Rome’s power, Lucius’ story “can be understood as the urgent search for the absolute in an age of unremitting absolutism” (Bradley, Apuleius 228). The popularity of the Isis cult and the emperor’s omnipotence are two features of the high imperial age that seem to run in tandem, and “a causal connection might be inferred” (Bradley, Apuleius 228). Bradley wonders how at the end Lucius can seem to have lost his proper curiositas and yet be called a man of doctrina. But Bradley’s reference to Augustine suggests the connection. Lucius still studies, is eager to learn, but, like many Christian writers, the traumatized Lucius uses his intellectual ingenuity to confrm his belief system, not question it. The Metamorphoses provides numerous details recalling then-current Greco−Roman realities (Millar, “World”). Being Edith Hall’s “ass with

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double vision,” Lucius idealizes many aspects of life in the Roman imperium, while closely and eagerly observing vivid, comic, and often horrifc examples of its political and social life. The Metamorphoses’ political unconscious appears not only in depictions of events with overtly political signifcances (e.g., the confict between the lawless landowner and the farmer’s three sons) but also in its portrayal of the entire precariat, slaves, and the lower levels of the working class, upon which Rome’s existence rested. In the year of Carthage’s ruination, Corinth was also destroyed. Refounded as a Roman colony, it fgured the relationship between Greece and Rome and still grieved Greeks in Apuleius’ era (Graverini, Literature 170– 75); note that it is one of three cities mentioned in the prologue. Alciphron (3.60) notes both its great wealth and poverty.40 Corinth was particularly known for its dissolute sexuality; recall the infamous temple prostitutes,41 Paul’s 1 Cor. 5.9 and the opinions of Roman and Greek satirists. This makes it an ideal birthplace for Lucius (2.12.13), the future self-deluding functionary of Roman power like his schoolmate, Pythias (1.22). Rome corrupts Greek habits; thus, the Plataean Demochares puts on Roman-style games with gladiators, criminals and beasts, including bears (4.13), whose diseased bodies are eaten by starving commoners. Yet when thieves bring the assLucius into a Greek village, he tried to invoke the nomen augustum Caesaris, like that of an omnipresent god. Lucius calls Rome sacrosanctam istam civitatam. Pseudo-Haemus claims that after Plotina persuaded the emperor to avenge her husband: “Therefore Caesar did not wish the gang of the bandit Haemon to exist, and immediately it perished; so powerful indeed is nod of the great princeps” (7.7), this nutus recalling the nod of Zeus. Milo will likewise inquire about the aristocracy of Corinth and the princeps (1.26); Byrrhaena praises Hypata’s public buildings as the equal of Rome (2.19), yet her city allows the countryside’s peace.

Socrates, Odysseus, Jason and Hippolytus Lucius is on a parodic search for wisdom. Greek literature and philosophy offered two models for wisdom—Odysseus42 and Socrates—whose evocations Apuleius’ narrative combines in connection with Vergil’s Aeneas and stories of Jason which Homer and Vergil drew upon. There are additional evocations of the legends of Theseus and Hippolytus. Odysseus represents experience and cunning, whereas Socrates denotes wisdom gained through hard, nontraditional thinking.43 The wandering, suffering Odysseus is a common model for the ideal novel’s traveling protagonists, and fctive stories about Socrates provide paradigms of fction (Hunter, Plato 300). Book 1 sets up “the (life) choice of Lucius,” one in which desire and action is tempered by philosophic reason, or one in which emotions and desire ignore reason (Finkelpearl, “Judgment”). Lucius has studied philosophy at Athens; indeed, people consider him a pepaideumenos, but as indicated by his enjoyment of the (possibly proleptic) marvels by the Stoa Poikile and of the parodic story

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of Socrates, he instead sought magic’s power over normative reality.44 That Socrates engages in the sort of serviles voluptates that will doom Lucius,45 suggests that Socratic reason is no match for human lust and witchcraft. The novel’s opening recalls the beginnings of Platonic dialogues which refer to a journey (e.g., Resp. 327a; Harrison, “Epic Extremities” 242). Lucius (1.2), after traversing steep and slippery (and symbolic) mountain paths, dismounts from his white horse, a symbolic disconnect with Phaedrean better part of his soul, the prelude to his underworld experience; yet the mention of the horse’s sweat and stomach stresses the physical, Lucius’ current focus (König 223–24). The Phaedrus concerns educational rhetoric;46 Lucius overhears the one traveler demanding the other (Aristomenes) stop telling such fantastic tales, which subversively echoes Phaedrus’ admiration for how Socrates can make up stories about Egypt (275b; Kirichenko 99). Lucius’ eagerness to hear also ironically recalls Socrates, so in love with logoi he is eager to listen to Phaedrus even if he walks all the way to Megara (227d). And the initial debate concerns an important philosophical issue— whether mythoi can contain truth and the existence of any sure categories of knowledge.47 Aristomenes’ Socrates, whose misfortunes foreshadows Lucius’ future, recalls Odysseus trapped by a witch and reduced to a no-man who becomes a ragged beggar ( Met. 1.12.6) and must be cleaned up to tell of his adventures (Graverini, “Winged Ass” 216–17). This Socrates tells Meroe, like Odysseus, of his long journey,48 and she calls him Ulysses to her Calypso (1.12). This Socrates seems to be play-acting, overly dramatic, often seeing himself a ft subject for declamation, rather like Lucius (and Encolpius and Kleitophon [Keulen, “Comic Invention” 118]). Socrates sees himself as a victim of Fortune (1.7.1) echoing Mithras’ later comments about Lucius (10.13.1), whose fundamentally good judgment had been clouded by servilis voluptas. This debauched Socrates fgures Lucius’ spiritual state and points ahead to the tableaux of the Judgment of Paris and Lucius’ diatribe on the condemnation of Socrates. Note that when this Socrates, thinking he has escaped, eats vigorously, and then goes to a stream to drink, his heart pops out; the Phaedrean Socrates’ divine sign warned him not to cross the stream because he needed to produce a refutation of his blasphemous speech on love (Phdr.  242b–c; Kirichenko 94). Apuleius’ Socrates made no such expiation and dies. This disaster, perhaps, foreshadows the self-exiled Lucius’ future and how, thinking he has escaped the consequences of his sordid past, tasting the good life, Lucius loses his soul beside the Tiber.49 Lucius is one who can be fatally lulled by the false murmuring of the Phaedrean cicadas, and his desire to become a bird fgures his desire for deeper philosophic knowledge, but instead, Lucius more naturally becomes an ass, not a philosopher.50 The donkey’s constant focus on the ground symbolizes Lucius’ preoccupation with earthy, not heavenly items; his going around at the mill suggests a meaningless life.51 But at the end, the reader must decide if the bald-headed Lucius recalls a deluded clown or the paradigmatically

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bald and self-ironic Socrates, with comic and asinine qualities, resembling a Silenus (Graverini, Literature 170–75) who hides something godlike inside. Furthermore, Lucius, partially due to his rash curiosity,52 is persecuted by Fortune as Odysseus is threatened by Poseidon. Stripped of his stable identity to wander in a bizarre world, he struggles to regain his old Lucius. Circe sends Odysseus to the Deadlands; Many of Lucius’ adventures occur when he is presumed dead. Odysseus avoided being turned into a pig by Circe and was able to hear the Sirens; his Circe, of course, turns Lucius into an animal.53 Circe distracts Odysseus for a year; Lucius tells Fotis that he is so enamored of her body that he does not seek his household Lar nor is preparing to return home (3.19.6).54 Lucius’ desires to be restored to his humanity, not to his family, and he hardly mentions his patria, and abandons, not restores, his native city. Hospitality is a defning value in the Odyssey, and a harsh lack of hospitality characterizes the Metamorphoses. Lucius, wondering at the mill’s hell-world, evokes Homer as presenting Odysseus as a paradigmatic wise man, but then notes he has, like Odysseus, become multiscius, but still minus prudentem (9.13).55 As in the Odyssey an unnoticed beggar is an ideal spy, an ass with a curious human mind is even more so. Multiscius may have the sense given it by Apuleius elsewhere, suggesting that varied experience is essential to producing sophisticated works, an adjective which looks forward to Lucius auctor. The text confrms this, as immediately after using this word, Lucius offers his reader a fabulam bonam . . . suavem (9.13). That Lucius is grasping material for his future book may explain the ekphrasis on the mill shortly thereafter (Montiglio, “You” 101; Kenney, “In” 161). There is Fryean sixth-phase quality to how the postBook-11 Lucius is looking back, perhaps implying that he became prudens (a blinkered fashion), doing the recollection that Isis commanded (11.6). The story of Odysseus has a dialectical relationship with the story of Jason, who to regain his kingdom, made a coming-of-age quest to the far East, a virtual underworld, seduced/seized the daughter of an Eastern King and a witch and returned to Greece. His relationship with Medea caused him wide wanderings, costing him his kingdom and children, leading to his pitiful death at Corinth. Apollonius presented Jason’s failed coming-of-age quest in the context of contrasts between Homeric style heroes (Peleus) and craftier “Hellenistic” heroes like Jason himself. The questing Lucius, like Jason, gets erotically entangled with witchcraft, causing his near fatal wanderings. Jason himself is from Thessaly, and by bringing Medea to Thessaly, he introduces Greece to magic, making Thessaly a byword for magic (Kirichenko 95). The Aeneid is an important intertext for the Metamorphoses and contrasts Ulysses and Aeneas, that refugee of problematical Troy. Aeneas wanders and suffers much, and must, with many false turns (including sexual disaster), seek a new home and establish Roman power in Italy; similarly, Lucius, after many problematical adventures, leaves his old, also compromised city (Corinth) to establish himself at the heart of Roman power. Vergil’s Aeneas

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recalls Jason in his initial lack of real desire for his mission and his nearfatal love relationship with an eastern queen. Venus and Jupiter are steering the career of the reluctant Aeneas; in different ways, Venus and Isis guide Lucius’ sufferings, eventual rescue and translation to service at Rome. Most importantly, to prepare himself for Latium, the still-not-prepared Aeneas must undergo a mystery-religion-evoking underworld journey, where Trojan Aeneas is reborn as Roman Aeneas. Similarly, the unprepared Lucius undergoes the death-and-rebirth-evoking rites of Isis and leaves for Rome soon afterward. As the Aeneid ends abruptly, with Aeneas having won the war but not yet having established the peace, the Metamorphoses ends with an imperfect verb, signaling incomplete action, the story unfnished. Fathers, proclaimers of their word, fgure greatly in Greco−Roman cultural productions. The Onos-prototype presents a prodigal son story of a father dispatching the son on important family business, the son getting distracted with his own agenda and suffering, but fnally, in part due to his father’s infuence, returned to the parental fold. Apuleius’ Lucius seems on business for Demeas (a father substitute), perhaps having, like the Prodigal Son, “attached himself to a man of another country” (Luke 15:15), probably for self-advancement.56 Demeas has sent him to Hypata, where too Lucius is distracted. In both novels Lucius is a young aristocrat, an akolastos, a desire-enslaved, shallow creature with a fckle attention span. I do not think, pace Harrison (“Lucius” 4), that Apuleius names Lucius’ father Theseus simply for a reference to Callimachus’ Hecale (1.23). As noted, the name “Theseus” would ft the quest paradigm where the hero is a king’s son. The subsequent “tale of the wicked stepmother” (10.2–12) evokes the Hippolytus, and its virtual Phaedra connects to the various other sexually dangerous women.57 In myth, the son is often either the ruin (Theseus) or the redemption (Telemachus) of his father. Apuleius crafts the Lucius myth as a version of Hippolytus myth with an (ironized) happier ending. The full Hippolytus myth presents a young man torn between types of knowledge and living symbolized by his father and mother, who is destroyed and reborn. The paradigmatic name Theseus symbolizes the normal aristocratic political career associated with the word of the father, along with the rational world that undergirds it (fgured by Athens, Socrates and allusions to philosophy), which Lucius rejects in favor of his mother’s world. Recall his mother’s side that brings him glory through relation to Plutarch;58 tellingly, his mother’s name is Salvia (“Ms. Salvation” [2.2.8];59 Lucius describes Isis as one who offers dulcem matris adfectionem to human suffering (11.25.1). Isis, too, declares herself rerum naturae parens (11.5.1), an ironic contrast with Venus the “bad mother” of Cupid and Psyche (4.30.1). Like Hippolytus, Lucius devotes himself to a more exclusive form of knowledge, witchcraft; Hippolytus’ Artemis in her Hecate form is associated with witches. Lucius, a kind of momma’s boy (Lateiner, “Humiliation” 327), fnds mother-secrets in Hypata, a land of witches, particularly through Pamphile and Byrrhaena, the latter a dangerous foster mother

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with witchlike properties. Hippolytus was destroyed in part through gaining (albeit unwillingly) forbidden knowledge about a mother-fgure. Both Hippolytus and Lucius will be extreme in their devotion to Artemis and Isis and reject warnings about dangerous behavior. Lucius sees Pamphile’s nude metamorphosis to pursue illicit love, while Phaedra’s forbidden desire shocks Hippolytus. In both works, the mistake of the woman’s maid, trying to make a desire-mediated connection between her mistress and the young man, causes the protagonist’s loss of self. The rejection/curse of his father (who invokes his own father) causes Hippolytus to be destroyed by his own horses, symbols of his repressed sexuality (Segal, “Tragedy”). Lucius, rejecting his father’s world, is nearly destroyed by the animal forces within him fgured by the ass form he assumes. Hippolytus and Apuleius’ Lucius fail in their attempts to attain proper adult sexuality.60 Just like virgins can imagine themselves brides of Christ, so Lucius is a kind of bride of Isis, and his frst initiation has overtones of a marriage ceremony (Lateiner, “Marriage” 326). Lucius is saved from a virtual death by Isis, as was Osiris. In one tradition, Hippolytus is resurrected by Artemis as Virbius in Italy, subsequently loves and marries Aricia and has a son by her (Aen. 7.761–64). But instead of obtaining a wife and starting a family in the context of his wider community, Lucius becomes the sexless spouse/servant of Isis, a member of a “family” of Isis’ worshippers at Rome. Lucius and Hippolytus experience an epiphany of a goddess, but in Euripides’ play, Hippolytus’ experience is disappointing, while Isis promises Lucius restoration and more. In the Onos, Lukios’ brother brought him home, but Apuleius’ Lucius seems quite detached from his family and fnally abandons them, along with his Greek homeland. At Rome, the reborn, hybrid Lucius (a mix of Greek, Roman and even some Egyptian) works at the center of Roman power, whereas the hybrid Hippolytus (half Greek, half Amazon), being illegitimate, cannot even hold Athenian citizenship. Theseus claimed that Hippolytus indulged in Orphic mysteries (Eur. Hipp. 952-4). Lucius embraces the Isiac mysteries (Met. 11.23). Euripides’ Hippolytus cultivates chastity as Artemis’ devotee and keeps the company of like-minded friends (Eur. Hipp. 1015–20), which produces a dangerous alienation from the world. In his ability to plead a case (his own), Hippolytus fails miserably; Lucius becomes a successful lawyer at Rome. Now, with these preliminaries over, as with D & C, I produce a reading of Lucius’ parodic quest for knowledge and his place in world, which has fve stages. Stage one: the beginning of the descent Lucius arrives at Hypata from Corinth, corresponding to a young man’s/ quest hero’s leaving home. In the Faust myth, the discouraged, alienated scholar gains access to the power of Mephistopheles by explicitly rejecting God. Lucius’ desire for magical power is similar to Faust’s desire for power

242 Apuleius’ Metamorphoses through demons. Lucius’ dismounting from his symbolic white horse, his attitude toward fantastic stories, and his carnality and dismissal of philosophy similarly opens his highway to the Hades. Milo’s house, outside the city limits, functions as an underworld gateway. Fotis, the initiator of his hell-world experience, is the demanding doorkeeper from whom Lucius must request entrance. Note later she takes the initiative and firts with him. Milo’s surreal lack of hospitality, obsessions about money, and unnecessarily wretched clothing make him a demonic fgure. In the Odyssey, hospitality is an important indicator of civilization, and his inhospitable reception by Milo (1.23) comically contrasts with Evander’s invitation to Aeneas to come into his hut (Verg. Aen. 8.362–65; Harrison, “From” 57–58); of course, Evander offers Aeneas the possibility of godhood; Milo’s home offers transformation into an animal and entry to Hades. Underworlds are full of absurd actors, like Milo, as well as Lucius’ schoolmate Pythias who has gained a habitum . . . magistratui congruentem (1.24)—Pythias’ fate illustrates how incorrect desires for political position can balefully transmute one, as Lucius may be transmuted at Rome. Lucius pursuing Pamphile through her maid fgures Lucius trying to seize a female belonging to his host, a common mythic archetype.61 Lucius’ subsequent foodless conversation with Milo, prolonged until Lucius babbles (1.26), involving the whole network of relations Lucius is associated with, resembles a preliminary interrogation by intelligence offcials to ensure Lucius is set on the proper Hadesward course. Milo notes how Lucius’ looks indicate his nobility; such fattery may put Lucius off guard. Lucius’ awakening (2.1) in Hypata signals that break in consciousness associated with underworld descents. Unable to properly process reality, he sees metamorphoses everywhere, being blind to mutability’s dangers. His suggestable mood (2.2; he goes house to house, tormented by desire) sets up his encounter with Byrrhaena, a locally powerful evil mother substitute with witchlike properties. Byrrhaena’s recognition of Lucius recalls the problematical Helen’s recognition of Telemachus. Richly adorned, having a crowd of attendants, she also recalls Vergil’s Dido and thus poses a danger to Lucius’ identity, as Dido threatened Aeneas, Medea threatened Jason and Calypso and Circe threatened Odysseus. I believe the coordination of the Hypatans in victimizing Lucius indicates that Byrrhaena sets the willfully blind Lucius up, while ironically letting him know his impending fate. Note how the unreality Lucius encountered in Hypata extends to her house,62 where “what could not be, there it was” (2.19), which should be construed with Byrrhaena’s comment made when Lucius views Acteon’s statue: “Yours are all which you see” (2.4). These words suggest the perils of improper curiosity, which foreshadows Lucius’ horrifc metamorphoses, as does Thelyphron’s story. Later, Lucius’ altered consciousness is evident, when, with uncharacteristic bravery, as if a Hercules (2.32) he kills the supposed bandits, then simply goes to bed, only to wake up the next morning and realize he is in deep trouble.63

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The internal Lucius narrator resembles Thelyphron who narrates his earlier embarrassment, perhaps juicing up his story to entertain the banqueteers. Byrrhaena calls Thelyphron’s tale a sermo lepidus, recalling the prologue. Byrrhena’s banqueters laugh at poor Thelyphron (2.20 and 2.31), as the crowd laughed at Thelyphron discovering his mutilated state, all foreshadowing the sadistic laughter of the Risus festival (Shumate 82–85). To Hypata’s elite anticipating the next day’s jest, his aunt displays a prior victim of humiliation and a future one; note Byrrhaena wants Lucius to come back after his embarrassment (Lateiner, “Marriage” 226). Peden (381) suggests the statues Lucius sees, “images of the palm-bearing goddess,” represent Victory-Fortuna-Isis, as Isis wears such victory symbols on her sandals (11.4). These images better symbolize how Lucius is entering the realm of Victorious Fortune—victorious over him, that is. The heedless Lucius, further infamed with desire, leaves her abruptly, ready to willingly leap into the pit (2.6). As in the Onos (but with more detail), Lucius aims to seduce Fotis (May 59–74) who has already firted (purposefully?) with him (2.6).64 Through themes of servitium amoris and militium amoris Lucius evokes the enslaved and enlisted elegiac lover, elements duplicated in his relationship to Isis, indicating Lucius’ predisposition to eroticized slavery.65 Lucius’ lack of desire to return to his Lar connects to his slavish addiction to Fotis’ sexual beauty (3.19), and later, he claims he will be her slave if she helps him transform himself into an owl (3.22). Her Apuleian name Fotis (“Miss Light”) suggests the hope of illumination offered by a proper love affair,66 but her Onos-name Palaistra reveals her ability to sexually “pin” Lucius, agreeing with the undertone of struggle between male and female (Schlam, “Sex” 97). Initially, Fotis’ slave status, in contrast to Lucius’ high rank, is stressed (1.23 and 1.26), but soon positions are reversed; he submits to her orders and must gain her deity-evoking nutus (Hindermann 76–77) to go to the dinner party at Byrrhaena’s (2.18). Milo’s mocking of Pamphile’s prediction, followed by Lucius’ defense, recalls the unnamed companion who mocks Aristomenes’ claims for magic, with Lucius defending, except here. Lucius is bested by Milo, who is also virtually warning Lucius, having an affair with a woman of his household, that he should not be confdent in the outcome. The con man Diophanes’ herecorrect prophecy about Lucius’ literary future comes right before Lucius makes his frst, critical missteps leading to his disastrous transformation with his night of excessive (if also romantic) sex with Fotis; his underworld assjourney is fnally bookended by his night of excessive (if also romantic) sex with the Corinthian matron,67 the prelude to his retransformation through Isis. Note how quickly Fotis gives in to him, as if a-not-accidental Circe. Fotis, who warned him about marauding hooligans, will cause the wineskins to come to the door,68 as she will accidentally (?) cause Lucius’ asinine transformation. Note that Lucius later connects the loss of the symbolic Candidus with Fotis entangling him in his evil wanderings (11.20).

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The Risus festival previews the hell-world Lucius will travel through, in which desire is often connected with that sadistic, but quite Roman (Lateiner, “Humiliation” 244–45), pleasure in seeing others degraded. Myth-thematically, the Risus festival corresponds to the demonic horror trial with its inversions of social norms. The Risus festival is a foundational rite reasserting a communal identity (2.31), recalling public rituals in which the noncitizen as pharmakos is driven out; note Lucius’ outsider’s status is stressed (peregrinus, alienus [3.3]).69 The rites at Hypata and Corinth concern the communal expulsion and punishment of the other, while the Isis rituals will concern integration and rescue. Slater notes how a “spectorial and . . . theatrical paradigm underlies much of the Golden Ass” (“Spectator” 86); Thelyphon’s banquet performance previews how Lucius is displayed at the Risus festival, potentially at the Corinthian spectacle, as a devotee of Isis, and fnally as a book-character. The Hypatan elders’ prediction that the god of laughter will  accompany Lucius everywhere, and their hope he will make some invention to honor the god (2.31.2–3) likewise points to our novel (Schlam, Metamorphoses 42; Tatum, Apuleius 44). Lucius’ refusal of a commemorative statue, recalling Thelyphron’s initial reluctance to tell his frightful story, shows Lucius’ unwillingness to accept the symbolic social role the Hypatans assigned him, a rejection which serves (if not causally) as prelude to him being driven from Hypata. Note that Lucius’ courage to speak (and to lie extravagantly) arises from oborta divinitus audacia (3.4.2), his faculty for deceptive rhetoric being of potential use to Isis.70 Later, Lucius will take delight at being set up as a kind of a statue for Isis. Stage two: Lucius’ transformation and deeper descent Lucius’ transformation into an ass (that animal hated by Isis [11.6]) recalls that profound loss of self-characteristic of underworld travels. He becomes the ultimate slave to whom anything can be done, with literally no ability to talk back. Odysseus’ disguise as a beggar made him the ideal spy to learn (often through dangerous direct experience) the decency of others. Lucius’ ass disguise will enable this and more. Odysseus’ time in the Deadlands allowed him to better grasp his old life by seeing his connection with fgures of his past as a prelude to the successful restoration of his identity and home. As noted, Lucius, having disappeared, is presumed dead. The question is, what will Lucius learn in this virtual Deadland as a prelude to the restoration of his human form and status? Here, as in the other novels, bandits are forces of disorder indirectly serving the amatory plot and Fortune and also represent social formations opposed to the oppressive status quo. They are the frst threats mentioned by Mithras (11.15.3), and they start the plot by waylaying Socrates (1.7.6; Graverini, “Robbers”). Milo’s proleptic fear of bandits explains his poorly furnished house (1.23.20); Lucius’ slays wineskins he believes to be bandits (2.32.3). Bandits abduct Lucius and later Charite, and Haemus/Tlepolemus

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spins a tale about his own destroyed robber band. Revealing the limitations of Roman power and its social order,71 these denizens of the demonic lower world (note references to the tombs and corpses [Hidalgo de la Vega; Shaw, “Bandits”]) recall bandit scenes in the other ideal novels, as well as Lollianus’ decidedly nonideal Phoinikika.72 Lucius’ real and idealized Rome contrasts with real and idealized Greece, which in turn contrasts with the Greece of farmers, mill-owners, slaves, and brigands. While these robbers present an inverse depiction of the heroic world, they also refect the conventional world and epic and historical realities.73 They organize themselves like soldiers (3.28.1–2), give themselves heroic names (Lamachus and Alcimus),74 and their raids recall the expedition against Thebes and the battle of Plataea (Harrison, “Literary Topography” 45–47), although, as ftting the comic-ironic vector, they are really common, and often bumbling, thieves (4.8.9). The robbers, like Lucius himself, illustrate how human self-delusion makes us imagine ourselves to be what we cannot be, with often tragic results; thus, Thrasyleon’s donning a bear’s hide enabled his inner bearnature, which trapped and doomed him; note Lucius was in many ways an ass before he turned into one.75 Lucius’ time among the bandits is signifcant, particularly in hearing the Cupid and Psyche fable, the opening section of the Psyche-Charite complex. Lucius’ description of their mountain location is a proof offered by the Lucius-auctor that the Lucius-actor retained a human mind within his assform (4.6.2). Their hideout’s fantastical, symbolic and rhetorical description (4.6.1–4)76 echoes the fantasy aspects of the Cupid and Psyche story, which, in turn, foreshadow the happy ending of Tlepolemus’ rescue of Charite, during which the lover-hero Tlepolemus deceptively enters the Mordor of the Thieves and destroys it from the inside, a destruction enabled by Tlepolemus’ fairytale of Plotina. As a work of hopeful fantasy, it might be called a “mountaintop experience”—like when Paris, the shepherd, met Aphrodite, which prefgured disaster. Likewise, the terrible dream Charite has about Tlepolemus and the gruesome suicide and sad disposal of the self-slain teller of a comforting old wives tale foreshadow how these triumphs over disorder will prove illusory. The Cupid and Psyche fable is a virtual fgure for the whole novel, and Psyche’s adventures furnish a commentary on Lucius’ own career.77 It is called a Milesian tale (4.3.2), pointing to shared parodic elements. The prologue narrator evokes a degenerate rhetoric designed to permulcere aures, anticipating the old woman who, delira et temulenta,78 narrates the fable (1.1.1 and 6.25).79 I believe that the internal narrator is the older Lucius whose earlier inability to appreciate the incongruities and implications of the Cupid and Psyche fable (thinking it a mere bellam fabellam [6.25]) implies that the episode was created or revised later to underscore aspects of Lucius’ (then unknown) future career. Thus, Apollo speaks in Latin “for the beneft of the establisher of this Milesian tale” (4.32.6). Note the jarring reference to Rome’s metae Murtiae (6.8.2). Why references to Roman topographical

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features completely obscure to Greek Charite? The fact that the fable’s Venus sends Mercury to Rome (as opposed to Paphos, for example) makes sense only to those for whom Rome is the world’s center, where Lucius too will be sent. Apuleius’ Metamorphoses often evokes the Aeneid, especially in Psyche’s katabasis,80 evocations which undercut idealizations of Rome, its culture, power and history, to provide ironic context to Lucius’ fnal deluded role at the center of Roman power. Accordingly, in the Cupid and Psyche fable, Jupiter is presented as a Roman emperor ruling over all-toohuman Olympians, using a dreaded fne (6.23) to compel attendance. Even while enabling Cupid to marry Psyche legitimately, having mentioned the Julian law on adultery, he asks Cupid to remember him if in the future he sees any notable beauty (6.22)! Venus is mostly patterned on the Aeneid’s Juno with a bit of Lucretian Venus thrown in (4.30.10), with considerable comic touches.81 Both Apuleius’ Venus and Vergil’s Juno eventually support a hybrid marriage they had opposed. The underworld descent is a hero’s capstone experience, often a prelude to divinization; our originally simple Psyche will become a god, as Hercules did and as Aeneas will (Aen. 6.129–31). Her descent also recalls Orpheus’ erotically determined descent in the Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Orpheus is instructed not to turn back to look at Eurydice, while Psyche opens the forbidden box, recalling Pandora.82 Charite, like Orpheus, not Aeneas, will be destroyed in love. Orpheus is said to have learned mystic knowledge during his descent, which maps onto Lucius’ own pursuit of mystic knowledge. These Aeneid features, plus Charite’s evocations of Dido, deconstruct the Aeneid’s picture of divine reconciliation, and thus its vision of a harmoniously refounded Roman state. As discussed below, the underworld ass with its lame driver whom Psyche sees is recalled by the comic Pegasus and Bellerophon in the Isis procession (11.8), and both look forward to Lucius’ own future as Isis’ tame ass at Rome with Asinus Marcellus as his handler, which ironically corresponds to how his katabasis gives Aeneas a look into the more positive Roman future. All this accords with how the child Voluptas fgures the parable’s philosophic shallowness which aligns with Lucius’ own superfciality (Penwill, “Slavish Pleasures”). This prior Lucius is the ideal auditor of a lavish production of Second Sophistic art, which is also an “old wives tale” in its emphasis on entertainment, in its positive views of love and the possibility of a transcendent happy ending (Graverini, Literature 96–131). Cupid and Psyche, like the Metamorphoses itself, can be read as an entertaining story by one kind of reader, and as a more philosophically complex tale by another (Smith, “Cupid” 70). The parallels with the Phaedrus and the Symposium exist ironically,83 its anus a kind of Diotima, recalling that idealized view of love as the soul’s true object in contrast with the novel’s sordid amatory entanglements. An ironized epic tale of profound transformation,84 it is situated in the Metamorphoses close to where underworld journeys are located in the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Psyche, as semigoddess, mirrors the younger Lucius’ own lofty self-esteem.

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Psyche, like Lucius, is also impulsive, overly curious and, to some extent, alienated from her parents, especially from her father, who is partially responsible for her exile. Lucius will abandon his parents, and Psyche never seems to inform her grieving parents about her fate. As with Lucius, individuals prey upon Psyche’s innocent, gullible nature to goad her into that lapse that causes her exile. Her false understanding of the nature of Cupid aligns with Lucius’ fawed understanding of divinity. As Psyche must endure Venus’ torments, Lucius endures Fortuna’s tortures. Psyche suffers in a virtual Hades, and likewise Lucius’ whole ass-life is a kind of false death. Psyche is saved by the intercession of a Cupid she can fnally see, and then is assumed into an Olympian heaven after a wedding with eschatological overtones. Lucius is saved by Isis encountered during an epiphany, then is assumed into the worldly heaven of Rome. His initiation into Isis has overtones of a marriage rite (Lateiner, “Marriage” 326). Just as Psyche cannot fnd safety in the world and must be translated to Olympus, so Lucius must leave his horrifc Greek homeland for sacrosanct Rome. The Cupid and Psyche fable consoles Charite and attracts Lucius because it presents, with genders reversed and gender equality lost, the basic myth of the ideal Greek novel (Kenney, Cupid 7–8). Psyche, like Callirhoe and other heroines, seems a purer goddess come to earth—as the deceptive Venus of the Corinth mime will appear to be. She and her noble consort fall in love, but mostly (but not completely) because of the machinations of the evil world, they suffer in a kind of Hades, enduring virtual deaths and attempted suicides, and prove their mutual devotion, until, aided by divinity, they reunite, with Psyche now divine and thus secure in her happy ever after. They achieve adult status, and their (problematical but symbolic) divine child, Voluptas suggests the delight they obtain as well as an accomplished good for the greater community. Apuleius gives this ideal ending a horrifc reversal in Charite’s fate, underscoring a point implied in Cupid and Psyche—safety is only found outside the normative world; thus, Lucius fnds his safety, but only in an Isis-friendly, semidivine Rome. The circumstances leading to Charite’s abduction and rescue recall the ideal novel, but her subsequent dream (4.26–27) predicts the coming tragedy. Fitting its later Lucius-narrator, the “ideal” story of Cupid and Psyche has other perverse dimensions. Psyche recalls Andromeda and Polyxena, whose parents willingly sacrifce her (Smith, “Cupid” 75). Cupid’s palace possesses a potentially dangerous unreality, which Lucius encountered at the mansion of Byrrhena, whose comment to Lucius “All is yours which you see” (2.5) mirrors what Apollo offers to Psyche at his palace (5.2). As Lucius, because of the table talk at Byrrhena’s banquet, will fear invading bandits whom he imagines heroically slaying, Psyche, hearing stories about Cupid as monster, will try to kill him. In Apuleius’ world, great snakes can disguise themselves as old men (8.19), so the sisters’ story is not totally implausible. Jupiter and Venus are moved by passion, and divine corruption will be evident in the later Judgment of Paris mime. Psyche suffered disaster because, consumed with desire, she energetically kisses Cupid, causing hot oil to spill

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out and wake him (5.23). Psyche clinging to the fying Cupid and then falling echoes the Phaedrean downfall of souls, as did Lucius’ earlier dismounting from Candidus. As naïve Charite will change to punish her husband’s killer, simple Psyche becomes a murderous avenger against her sisters.85 The couple’s tragic fnale looks forward to the violence flled stories of Book 10. Note magic only fgures prominently in the stories before Cupid and Psyche; afterward, Fortune seems more in charge (MacKay, “Sin” 477), perhaps conforming to Lucius’ realization that magic can no longer help him. He will need Isis. Neither Charite nor Lucius fully appreciate the tale’s ironies and ambiguities; for Lucius it is a pretty fable, for Charite a framework for a happy end. The virtuous Charite stands in counterpoint to other evil, lustful women in the Metamorphoses (Schlam, Metamorphoses 74), but still perishes. Lucius and Charite are revealed as romantic fantasists; the escaping Charite imagines how she will honor Lucius with echoes of Vergil and Ovid’s depiction of Cyparissus’ stag (Finkelpearl, Metamorphosis 59), how a future painting in her home will memorialize their escape. She compares herself with Arion and then Europa, conjecturing that Lucius may be a transformed human now taking Zeus’ part (Lateiner, “Tlepolemus” 222–23). Anticipating Apuleius’ book, Charite declares: “This crude story [historia] will be perpetuated by the pens of the professors” (6.29). In contrast to this ideal dream, Lucius had remarked earlier how Charite was attractive even to an ass (4.3); and, during their escape, Lucius kisses her feet (6.28). Later, Lucius imagines picking out mares for intercourse at Charite’s farm (7.16), interspecies firting that foreshadows Lucius’ affair with the Corinthian matron. Even more misleading are Charite’s references to Attis and Protesilaus whose short marriage with Laodamia,86 his subsequent violent death, her worship of him as a statue, his spectral return, and her suicide foreshadow their tragic future (Lateiner, “Tlepolemus” 228). The Attis reference suggests his tragic death during the hunt, and Charite will worship Tlepolemus as a kind of Dionysos, explaining her maenad-like frenzy (resembling Dido in Aen. 4.300-03) as she avenges him.87 Psyche saw a stand-in for the Lucius-ass in the underworld, fguring their intertwined stories. The bandits’ plan that Charite be killed by being sewn up within a dead Lucius suggests how Charite’s death will reside within the story of ruined Lucius. Charite’s frst fantasy of escape failed; the second will fail, too. Later, Charite’s servant (8.1) says he will narrate “events that deserve to be recorded by some historian, more gifted than I, whom Fortune has blessed with a more stylish pen,” alluding to Lucius’ future writing. The rescued Charite is properly married, and Lucius hopes to share her good fortune (7.13–15), which looks forward to Lucius’ mistaken joy at his new luck when he becomes Thiasus’ favorite. At the wedding, Lucius envies dogs eating the rich table scraps; later, in the cooks’ service, Lucius will do exactly that. Furthermore, the procession of townsfolk with Charite, the maiden on an ass, looks forward to when Lucius will carry the Syrian

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Goddess, as well as when, being star of the Isis procession, he displays his willingness to bear her burdens. Instead of bliss, Lucius enters an agricultural hell-world with its malignantly sadistic and deceitful boy who comes to a bad end; that hell-world will also consume Charite and Tlepolemus and their tormentor, Thrasyllus. The Charite−Tlepolemus−Thrasyllus episodes further deconstruct the erotic optimism of the Cupid and Psyche fable as their story becomes increasingly dominated by a kind of Vergilian furor, previewing the perverse, tragic stories of Book 10. No Greek novelist explains why their heroines should suddenly stop driving men to violence, and the horrifc epilogue to Charite’s romantic rescue shows clearly the inadequacy of this optimistic vision. It also undercuts the romantic conception of a univira like Laodamia, as does Petronius’ Widow of Ephesus story.88 Furthermore, while male protagonists in the extant ideal novels use trickery and even violence, none of their actions approach Tlepolemus’/Haemus’ manipulation of the bandits and its gruesome aftermath, as the tied-up bandits are rolled off a cliff or beheaded and left to rot (7.13). His story of Plotina, who persuaded a previously unsympathetic emperor to avenge her husband, and how he claims he escaped his band’s destruction pretending to be a woman, suggest the new recruit’s identity is dangerously unstable (Winkler, Auctor 87–89; Tatum, Apuleius 69). Lucius does not notice the strangeness of Haemus’ story either, probably because of his tendency to idealize love and Rome, Plotina almost certainly recalling Trajan’s ideal (at least as pictured) wife (Müller-Reineke). As Haemus disguised himself as a woman, Plotina disguised herself as a man and showed virile courage. How Tlepolemus convinces the robbers he is Haemus and becomes their leader, and how he then destroys them, parallels how Thrasyllus will convince Charite and Haemus that he is their best friend, so he can murder Tlepolemus and attempt to seduce Charite. This revelation of Tlepolemus’ bloody potential also foreshadows Charite’s evolution into a combination of crazed maenad and eye-gouging Hecube,89 as earlier sweet Psyche engineered the deaths of her sisters. Tlepolemus likewise role-plays, manipulating the victims’ desire, and uses a sleeping potion to gain revenge and be united with his bride; Charite, too, role-plays, manipulates Thrasyllus’ desire and also uses a sleeping potion to avenge Tlepolemus and be reunited with him—if only in an infernal marriage, the direct opposite to the Olympian union Cupid and Psyche will enjoy. The Metamorphoses presents critical views of the Roman imperium which Lucius idealizes and will serve. Cupid and Psyche presents Jupiter as a sensual and severe emperor. Haemus, showering the bandits with gold, recalls an emperor giving a donative (Finkelpearl, Metamorphosis 103). The emperor, who frst exiles, then avenges Plotina’s husband, acts arbitrarily. The affair between Dido and Aeneas presented contested constructions of Roman and Carthaginian cultural identity (Hexter 332–84; Finkelpearl, Metamorphosis 115–48). Charite and her fate recalls Vergil’s Dido, her suicide being connected to an attempt (in Aeneas’ case, successful) to cause

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her to compromise her dead husband. Apuleius’ depiction of Charite recalls Vergil’s Dido, but one who stays loyal to her dead husband, a point stressed by later African writers, responding to accusations that Vergil slandered Dido by inventing the love affair with Aeneas, which offers a correction to Vergil’s “offcial” Augustan version.90 The slaves’ dangerous escape further underscores the horrors of slavery and their obstacles to fnding freedom.91 Lucius’ becoming Pegasus out of terror (8.17; see also 6.40) anticipates how his adoption of the strict discipline of Isis arises from fear. The transformation of an old man into a snake who eats the compassionate young man (8.19) foreshadows how in the coming tales the deepest human sympathies will be betrayed. The fate of the slave bailiff transformed by ants into whitened bones after his jilted, crazed lover kills herself and their baby (8.22) also anticipates the two stories of erotic tragedy in Book 10, a prelude Lucius’ turn to Isis. Lucius’ time with the priests of the Syrian Goddess, adapted from the Onos, anticipates his future participation in the Isis cult as the stories of various encounters with magic, and witches previewed Lucius’ own baleful interactions with witch-magic. The balding eunuch head-priest (recall the conclusion’s shaven headed Lucius)92 named Philebus provides another ironic Platonic intertext, the Philebus, a dialogue about the ethics of pleasure.93 Philebus’ introduction suggestively implies Lucius will serve the priests sexually (8.26), using language recalling Anchises’ greeting to Aeneas come to visit him in the Deadlands (Aen. 6.687; Harrison, “Epic Extremities” 73). Isis worship was prominent at Rome; the worship of Cybele was even more evident.94 Artagatis is not Cybele, yet her priests and rituals share similar shocking features, such as castrated or effeminate priests who beg for gifts, bloody self-abuse in rituals, wild music, and dancing. Cybele was an indisputable part of the Roman tradition, as the Aeneid shows (2.692–704), and Aeneas himself comes from the East (Wilhelm). However contrary to traditional Roman mores, Cybele’s effeminate, castrated priests were Roman, and, despite attempts to distinguish “Roman” and “Phrygian” elements, Cybele worship remained a core component of Roman state religion (Beard). After Augustus, its public prominence increased, especially under Claudius and Antonius Pius, which inspired a backlash in writers like Seneca, Martial, and Juvenal. Like the priests in Apuleius, these greedy Galli use threatening prophecies to compel donations, and later, similar avarice is claimed as a reason the Isis priests at Rome demand additional initiations from Lucius. Apuleius pointedly links the two goddesses; the Galli are found to have stolen a cup from the Mother of the Gods, which the Galli claimed was a gift from the Mother of the Gods to her sister (9.10; Latham 113). Thus, Lucius’ negative comments about these priests (8.27) would apply to the priests of Cybele at Rome as well. Consider, too, how Lucius, suspected of being a rabid ass and locked up overnight, in the morning not only drinks the water offered to him (calling it the water of salvation) but even dips his head in the water (9.3), as he will dip his head in the sea

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at Cenchreae (11.1). Lucius emphasizes that he was able to enjoy the softness of the human bed (9.3), as he is later able to enjoy the beach sand at Cenchreae (10.35), both rests having come after Lucius has cleverly avoided not only death but also being eaten. Earlier, a dog stole a cut of meat (8.31), for which the cook wanted to kill and substitute Lucius; later, pastry chiefs, angered because Lucius lifted their leftovers, discover his thefts and their laughter attracts their master. Earlier, Lucius was threatened with being eaten by the cook’s master; at Corinth, Lucius is threatened by being eaten by the beasts for the enjoyment of his masters. Earlier, Lucius seemed a mad ass and is proved sane the next morning; at Corinth, he shares some of the desire-induced madness of the Corinthian crowd; of course, the next morning Lucius displays greater sanity in devotion to Isis. While the corrupt priests of Artagatis provide contrast to the good worship of Isis, these parallelisms suggest more universal tendencies toward religious duplicity and delusion, although Lucius will give evidence that, to a certain degree, the Isis-priests are connected with divine power, while there is no evidence presented these priests are more than perverted poseurs. Stage three: the ascent The (apparent) upward curve for Lucius’ fortunes comes in the early Spring, when the market gardener has the run-in with the legionary (9.39–10.1), an episode adapted from the Onos. The market gardener is the most decent of Lucius’ masters, whom he lives with in wretched equality. There, Lucius learns of the terrible abuse of a poor landowner by a wealthy man openly disdainful of law and justice (9.35), mirroring a terrible social reality, as does the Roman soldier’s commandeering of the poor farmer’s ass (9.39 ff.).95 Note that the gardener’s story begins with an incipit, recalling Sallustian historiographical writing (9.31.2; Graverini, “In” 248–54). I posit servitium not only indicates Lucius’ service to the gardener but also to the Roman soldier. Sallust’s histories described how Rome’s simple peasant state fell into despotism. The story of the fate of the farmer’s three sons fgures one aspect of that tale; the story of the soldier’s abuse of the gardener displays another, where the army functioned as oppressors. Lucius’ snooping betrays the market gardener to the soldiers, saving the legionary (loss of a sword was a grave offence), with the gardener almost certainly lead off to death (9.42), with no sign of any remorse by Lucius, but rather happiness as the subject of a new proverb! Lucius’ further value is fgured as the soldier uses Lucius to carry him as a threatening symbol of empire through Greece; note that the soldier puts a long spear to inspire terror on the top of his baggage (10.1). Bearing the soldier, Lucius is literally a supporter of Roman power; later on, at Rome, practicing law, Lucius will be a supporter of the legal technology that keeps the empire running. This legionary, whose evil nature is clear, nevertheless is given an assignment only the most trusted servants of the empire would obtain—he is sent by his commander to carry a letter to

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Caesar. Soon, Divinity will send Lucius to Rome with his own litteras—the future stories he will write, joining an Isis (inventrix of writing) agreeable to Rome since the time of Sulla, whose invasion of Rome marked the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. Book 10 is dominated by images of violence and sexuality, so characteristic of Corinth, a city often associated with Venus and lewd behavior, being also an important symbol of Roman domination.96 The dealings of the cooks, Thiasus (the only named character in Book 10, whose name is associated with revels), the Corinthian matron, and amphitheater episode illustrate the mentality of the Corinthians as the Risus trial defnes the people of Hypata. The Corinthian mass murderess starts killing out of not-unfounded jealousy, as her husband’s mother tells him his sister’s true identity, fearing that her son might rape her (10.23); how the murderess horribly kills her supposed rival through fre recalls Medea’s murder of Glauce at Corinth (10.24). When Lucius is bought by the cooks and then Thiasus, he appears to begin his integration back into human form (Habinek 55). Corinth is Lucius’ birthplace, and his return there implies rehumanization and reintergration,97 yet these episodes reveal that Lucius “can’t go home again.” The wedding that often caps a hero’s career is replaced with the matrona episode; Lucius’ true, committed marriage will be to Isis. Eating human food and indulging other shallow human entertainments mark him more as a trained beast than a human being, faults seen earlier in Lucius’ eating contest. The episode with the aristocratic matron is far more romantic, and in contrast with Lucius’ prior recklessness with Fotis, a worried Lucius allows the matron to take the sexual initiative.98 But, however romantic, even tender, the affair appears, Lucius, the ass, is still an enabler of a woman engaging in bestiality.99 Note her desire is called vesana, a terrible offence against nature and human morality (10.19; cf. 8.15).100 A thematic connection exists between the elite matrona and the murderess and the arena—and the affair’s aftermath shows exactly how such behavior is rewarded. The earlier idealization of Hypatan Fotis anticipated the idealization of the even more transgressive Corinthian matrona. In the Phaedra story, justice required a kind of necromancy, the doctor raising the young boy from a deathlike sleep, recalling Thelyphron’s tale of how justice was done after an Egyptian priest revived the dead husband. Here, Lucius will be made the instrument of problematical justice. The Corinthian arena scene represents the nadir of Lucius’ underworld adventures, followed by a divine intervention/conversion experience with Isis and then his translation to Rome. I count three Isises in the Metamorphoses. One Isis is the ideal construct of Lucius’ own mind; she merges with the second Isis, upon whose image and cult Apuleius has projected the ideal dream of true religious vision and salvation. Third is the Isis who is simply the object of worship of an all-too-human cult with its charlatan priests and gullible followers, recognizable from literature and archaeology. Apuleius elsewhere demonstrates how he turned a known religious symbol into an

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icon for personal ideals; here, I suggest Apuleius projected upon Isis elements of his personal religious imagination. Isis was an easy choice and, as Plutarch shows, often respected. Apuleius is able to enter into the spirit of a powerful religious experience as seen in his great hymn to Isis and in the description of life at the Isis-compound at Cenchreae (11.17–25). I do not believe Apuleius makes any statement of personal faith but rather shows knowledge of the cult and its attractions (Harrison, “Apuleius, Aelius” 243). Lucius’ reaction to the Judgment of Paris mime corresponds to those moments in a salvation-narrative when a fgure makes some pointed rejection of his/her former baleful values; admittedly, Lucius’ statement is constructed of commonplaces and pronounced by a known asinine hypocrite; nevertheless, Lucius’ fortuitous escape to the beach soon follows. How the seductive beauty of Venus conquered Paris’ judgment corresponds to Lucius’ own judgment being clouded by servilis voluptas, refecting the earlier story of Aristomenes, symbolic of Lucius spiritual state in which sexual passion conquers Socratic guidance. Lucius is particularly susceptible to such violent, pornographic, and multimedia novelty, and he, like the Corinthians, is absorbed by the spectacle. The Corinthian arena is a meeting place for all society,102 as was the theater (Habinek 56). Corinth was a Roman colonia (like Madaura), and such munera were linked to the empire and its representative; note the Judgment of Venus was a foundational event in Roman history. Like the Risus festival and its mock trial, it aims to humiliate the outsider and transgressor; but the way in which the quasi-pornographic Judgment of Paris mime serve as prelude to the truly pornographic rape and death of the murderess suggests such torture and degradation less serves justice than the Corinthians’ excessive, sadistic scopophilia. Lucius condemns false judgments, without considering how sexual display and uncontrolled desire (embodied in the arena and offcial punishments enacted there) leads to those corrupt judgments.103 The tableau’s fantasy mountain recalls the Golden Age (10.34.2), a pleasant, deluding and (for Greece and Troy) fatal landscape, the setting for a primal scene of the judgment (10.33) which leads to a widespread enslavement by desire, a kind of primal fall of Humanity. Lucius is particularly attracted to the actress playing a virgin Venus (10.34) which recalls the description of Psyche (4.28). This Venus, even young, is trapping men’s minds, as Psyche swayed Cupid’s better judgment; she also evokes Venus’ dance in Cupid and Psyche. And while Paris will cause Troy’s destruction, Lucius will serve resurrected Troy at Rome. Paris will marry fatal Helen, and Lucius says that he is going to enter the bonds of matrimony with the condemned woman (10.29), also recalling, ironically, the marriage of Cupid and Psyche (Penwill, “On” 89–91). Lucius’ reference to the false condemnation of Socrates implies no sudden conversion to philosophy;104 Lucius imagines his readers rejecting a philosophizing ass (10.33), and his desire to escape arises from the concrete fear of being eaten by the beasts. Lucius and Paris, giving in to sensuality, made choices that destroyed them,105 but Lucius gets

254 Apuleius’ Metamorphoses a second chance to choose the correct goddess (Penwill, “On” 92–99). The Lukios of the Onos, after he returns to human form, tried to go back to the matron, but our Lucius has fnally learned his lesson. While not conversion in the Christian sense, Lucius manifests a significant (but not total) change of perspective, values and behavior.106 Such ill-motivated and abrupt changes are common in ancient hagiographies (e.g., St. Mary Magdalene) as well as in modern testimonies. Lucius’ “conversion” requires no deep metaphysical reorderings; it simply can represent the moment in which Lucius understands, probably more on the emotional level,107 that his disordered desires have wrecked his life, which he frames in terms of the desire-driven judgments of Paris and false judgments regarding Socrates.108 His solution will be to embrace a narrow obedience which will protect him from the exterior hell-world and from self-destructive forces within him, which will provide a path to success at Rome. Stage four: the Isis book, part I: the frst days of conversion Opinions about Book 11’s religiosity range from it being a barely disguised autobiography of Apuleius’ own conversion to a complete parody of a gullible religious enthusiast, mere legitimating ballast for an otherwise trivial story.109 Until his departure from Greece, the reader sees events primarily through the lens of Lucius’ consuming Isis-conviction. His earlier obsession with magic and metamorphoses, expressed in his projected fantasies, made the very stones of Hypata seem alive; a similarly skewed mindset is observed in Lucius’ description of the morning of his restoration at Cenchreae. Once moved to Rome, however, Lucius provides some negative details that allow a more independent judgment. The shore Lucius escapes to is a protected port (10.35); there, the Isis devotees will soon bless the sailing season. Lucius’ fall into sleep signals a transition to another frame of existence.110 Lucius’ wonder at the rising moon produces that uncanny feeling that Otto (Idea) saw as foundational for much religious experience. He has an immediate sense of the benefcent power of moon’s divinity and is laetus even before his prayer.111 After purifying himself Pythagorean-style,112 Lucius makes his initial, elaborate supplication (11.1). At Corinth, Lucius responded to an elaborate, artifcial display, but at Cenchreae, merely to a natural phenomenon, whose deeper signifcances arise from within Lucius himself. The subsequent Isis-vision (11.3) is a mystic revelation at the very border of language.113 Similarly, comforting dream-visions coming to those in desperate circumstances appear in many stories of saints and martyrs. Lucius once sought knowledge of supernatural powers that he might control through magic. Lucius now as suffering suppliant calls upon a different supernatural power. Lucius’ rescue by Isis corresponds to how archetypal heroes are saved by divine intervention. Earlier references to the power of Egyptian religion show that this faith has always been a possibility for

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Lucius. The claims of wonders and miracles too were especially attractive to many converts,114 but Lucius’ initial prayer to the moon is conventionally Roman and has a practical, rather than spiritual, goal (Bradley, “Contending” 323). Although Isis promises he will venerate her after death, Lucius is focused on her worldly benefts. Lucius mostly sees himself as a victim of fortune, and only with ac si does Lucius suggest possible errors. He certainly does not repent of his prior interest in magic (Keulen, “Lubrico” 31). Lucius learns nothing epistemologically unfamiliar; as Heliodorus’ Merotic religion/theosophy was a perfection of items existing in Greek religion and philosophy, Isis worship is likewise a perfection of elements found in Greco− Roman religion; Isis is a kind of henotheistic “High God” (Bradley, “Contending” 327), something of a philosophic vision of timeless unity, which strongly contrasts with the magical metaformations imagined at Hypata. Lucius is summoned by Isis, and such divine calls are seen elsewhere among Isis-worshippers, as well as testimony concerning continued communication with the god, a sense of being dedicated throughout life to her, and her worshippers living on temple grounds.115 Isis and Osiris have found him a promising talent for the future, whose poverty of means will be compensated for by the lavish rhetoric of his renatam linguam (11.14.2).116 In Book 11, divine providentia is stressed, especially that of Isis (11.5.4, 11.15.4 and 11.30.2; Graverini, Literature 96–97). In Apuleius’ era, providentia was especially linked to an emperor given increasingly godlike qualities. There was a priesthood of Providentia and of the Salus Publica at Corinth. Commodus-era coins have personifcations of Providentia and Felicitas joined with an image of a sailing ship,117 connecting to Apuleius’ depiction of the navigium Isidis; after the pomp, the prayers offered by the college of pastrophors begin with blessings for the Roman Emperor and the imperial power structure. Furthermore, Egyptian cults enjoyed considerable popularity, and Isis and Serapis could be equated with the Roman Emperor and Empress (Takács 112). Thus, Lucius simultaneously aligns himself with Isis and Rome and puts himself under the protection of their conjoined providentia. Similarly, in Cupid and Psyche, when Psyche’s prudentia fails, divine providentia comes to the rescue (6.13.6–15.1). Clearly, Providentia, whose activities merge with fatum, sors, and eventus—and these in turn with Isis—is a contributor to the baleful incidents in Lucius’ life which will break Lucius down so that he will more blindly serve Isis (Kenney, “In” 171). Penwill rightly criticizes moderns who cannot take Lucius’ conversion seriously (Penwill, “On” 107, n.54). The Metamorphoses’ story world allows a woman to become an owl, Lucius to become an ass, an old man to become a snake and the Egyptian priest to reanimate the dead; how is a true vision of Isis and the considerable foreknowledge she provides Mithras so out of place? The more idealizing “salvation” narrative which ends with Lucius’ move to Rome, gives Lucius very sound reasons for his faith in Isis’ power and worship, and the comic elements,118 part of Apuleius’ ludic perspective (familiar from the Onos), do not necessarily negate the positive. The earlier

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salvation narrative contains elements which suggest that Lucius’ account is the reproduced construction of a true believer whose new-found faith, combined with his tendency to idealize and to rewrite his life’s story, has made him ft events and even his perceptions into the paradigm of a proper salvation narrative, believing them faithful to the truth of experience. To what extent does he regain his old Lucius? There are considerable (if metamorphosed) continuities between the pre-and post-Isis Lucius, beginning with signifcant parallels between Lucius’ engagements with Isis and Fotis, supported by Lucius’ encomium on Fotis’ hair and his comparison of her with the marine Venus (2.17). Fotis earlier prepared a navigium Veneris (2.11.3) with Lucius, and now Lucius will be saved in the navigium Isidis. Lucius’ praise of Isis’ beauty and the erotic language with which he addresses her statue (11.24–25) indicate his old obsessions. Isis is the bringer of true light that Fotis should have been (Schlam, Metamorphoses 68–71). But Fotis is more than the Isis-antitype.119 Lucius is bound to each female, an agent for his transformation, in a demanding, obedient slavery (perpetual with Isis), with sexual overtones, enlisted like a soldier (11.15).120 Lucius wakes again to wonder at how the morning rejoices, recalling his frst full day in Hypata. The whole world seems to join in Ploiaphesia procession (11.8–11), some participants providing symbolic recapitulations of his life,121 a prelude to Lucius’ retransformation. Lucius walks gently into the procession, now the tamed black Phaedrean horse (11.12.2). There is a comic rendition of Bellerophon and Pegasus (11.9) which connects with earlier references to Lucius as Pegasus (6.30 and 8.16), as well as to the lame underworld ass Psyche sees and forward to Asinus Marcellus (Winkle 118–19). Winkler connects Mithras’ speech to supposed religious confdence men at Rome,122 suggesting that Mithras speaks when Lucius is trying to decide what to say, but Lucius has already made up his mind to praise the goddess; the question is how (Winkler, Auctor 214; Graverini, Literature 63). Mithras, whom Lucius will call his spiritual father (11.25) is pronouncing the word of the father defning the meaning of Lucius’ life and thus his identity. As in the Corinthian spectacle Lucius made a judgment on Paris’ life, here the Isis priest pronounces judgment on Lucius’ old life. Mithras lauds Lucius’ natales, dignitas, doctrina, refecting what Lucius said about himself earlier (1.2), indulging in class-based fattery, as if Lucius was a basically good comic hero, a noble young man “on the slippery point of youth” when he fell into serviles voluptates prompted by his proftless curiosity. Mithras is implying: “Lucius, even the best young men can mess up royally. But Isis has given you a second chance.” The crowd believes Lucius a virtuous person worthy of salvation (11.15.1–4), but this need not undercut Mithras’ interpretation, for it is a religious truism that the common crowd has a debased understanding of truth, a divide even more pronounced in a comic novel. Winkler correctly sees Lucius’ gratitude to Isis as conditioned by the understanding of his life that Mithras’ speech has provided, just as Dionysophanes revised Daphnis’ understanding of himself. Like Daphnis,

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Lucius has found a new father, indeed, a truer father, since their fates to him seemed joined divino quodam stellarum consortio (11.22).123 It may seem contradictory to claim that Lucius’ fate was caused by his faults and yet also by a “blind” fortune that is systematically persecuting Lucius (Graverini, Literature 62), but in the Metamorphoses, disaster can come from one’s faults or from the random destructiveness built into the world’s fabric. Note Lucius’ words about Isis’ right hand dextram qua fatorum etiam inextricabiliter contorta retractas licia, et Fortunae tempestates mitigas, et stellarum noxios meatus cohibes (11.25). Lucius has found a protective patron in Isis, and a political patron in the Roman empire. His extravagant prayers to Isis can be seen in the context of encomia of the emperors. Mithras tells Lucius to put on a joyous face and adopt that confdent step that signals in Lucius the triumph of Isis over Fortune (11.15.4), an appearance he will sincerely display over a year later at Rome. Lucius joins the Isis procession, becoming part of the spectacle; he now will be an object of display for Isis, both in person and in this text (Slater, “Spectator”). During his initiation, Lucius is set up by the priests like a statue (11.24.4)—which recalls the statue declined at Hypata. Sources as early as Varro made Isis the inventrix of writing (Finkelpearl, Metamorphosis 206), and the ship transports letters (11.16). Isis sends Lucius to Rome with a story that she (his muse)124 has commissioned, which connects with the prologue’s reference to Egypt, Diophanes’ prediction and other anticipations. During the Ploiaphesia ceremony, note how the high priest begins his prayer with a reference to the Emperor, Senate, and the people of Rome, with no mention of any Greek concerns, indicating the Rome-Isis connection (11.17). After this ceremony, Lucius, resting at the feet of goddess’ image, unable to leave, reveals his desperate brokenness (11.18). His time at the compound recalls those episodes in modern cults where a potential convert is surrounded and provided a new, positive community that reinforces his beliefs. His virtual underworld journey is not quite over yet; Psyche made a near fatal mistake while exiting the underworld, as did Orpheus. Lucius’ proper exit can only be accomplished by leaving this hell-world to enter the servitium of Isis.125 His preference for life in the Isis-compound126 to his family suggests his fnal destination. And now, Lucius appears more prudens, seemingly gaining some understanding of his limitations, as he wonders if he can assume the obligations of Isis-worship. Similarly, Augustine worried regarding Christianity (Keulen, “Lubrico” 40; Shumate 248–49). Constant dreams urge him on (11.19). The dream of the treasure-bearing high priest predicting the return of Candidus, the Phaedrean white horse, from whom Lucius dismounted while on the slippery roads of his initial journey, motivates Lucius’ fnal decision. His subsequent career is further guided by coordinated dreams like those of Aristides, common in Christian texts.127 Finally, Isis indicates that Lucius is ready for initiation, a profoundly symbolic ritual of death and rebirth, the salvation story capstone where Lucius worships the gods face to face. Lucius undergoes another metamorphoses,

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with a new elaborate, upright stance as opposed to that of the prone quadruped (O’Sullivan 196–216). This ceremony replaces the marriage which often occurs at the end of the hero’s journey (Lateiner, “Marriage” 326). And, in his elaborate costume, called signifcantly the Olympic stole, Lucius appears an incarnation of Sol-Apollo, which recalls Psyche’s translation to Olympus itself. Note how Isis is associated with the moon, and we recall Heliodorus’ reference to the Merotic marriage of the Sun and the Moon. Until sent away, Lucius constantly adores that statue with inexplicabili voluptate (11.25); here, recall the problematical child voluptas. Lucius’ desire for Fotis made him forget his Lar; here, he neglects his easily seen Corinthian Lar for Isis. As noted, in Isis, Lucius seems to have acquired an even more powerful mistress.128 Yet, once Lucius has committed himself, Mithras must deal with the impatient Lucius as if a child (11.21.3), suggesting a kind of reparenting, a second childhood, but also behavior consistent with Lucius’ prior impatience,129 a dangerous urge that recalls Psyche’s (6.21.1 and 11.21.6). But now, Lucius respects Mithras’ warnings and restrains himself. Like his old self, Lucius is childishly pleased by the thauma and dress up, which makes Lucius seem godlike. Note the arcane Egyptian holy books Mithras consults have an impressive magical quality to them (11.22). While Lucius hardly increases in moral awareness, there is a real contrast between the sword-swallower watching student of Book 1 and the hard-working, chaste, and studious Lucius of Book 11. To succeed at law would require new discipline and deportment (O’Sullivan 201), and his baldness can imply purity.130 In Book 1, he indulges in eating contests, and in Book 11 he fasts from meat although he engages in fne dining in regard to his initiation;131 in Book 1, he is eager to believe everything, and in Book 1, he needs more concrete assurances. Lucius may have become less curious, but his adopted discipline has given him better habits (11.30). Lucius’ hyperdutiful behavior connects to his endured trauma, and fear of its return, and signs of anxiety occur until the novel’s end. Lucius’ long, tearful departing prayer to Mithras, his new father, both suggests Lucius has joined a new family, but also indicates the power of the Hippolytus-infected “father issues” mentioned before—Mithras would have understood Hippolytus. Stage fve: the Isis book, part II: now Isis gets real at Rome Lucius leaves the temple of Isis but does not linger long at Corinth; prompted by Isis, he heads for Rome, arriving on December 12, around Saturnalia time. The last four chapters at Rome seem to have too many initiations, visions, and conclusions.132 The more subjective Lucius-perspective as Isis-worshipper at Greece and his more objective view at Rome corresponds to ideal and real depictions of Roman and Isaic power. But the problems Lucius encounters at Rome map onto the general diffculty of living in a big, elaborate and expensive city with obtuse bureaucracies. Lucius does not object to the extra initiations as such but worries that Mithras and Asinus

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did not quite know what they were doing—as we might wonder about any mortal bureaucrat. A marvelous escape from the pyre fnally assured Heliodorus’ Charikleia of the divine plan. Comparing the horrors of Greece with Lucius’ experiences at Rome, no matter how servile and incurious, Lucius has grounds to think himself better off. Despite surprises and diffculties, Lucius’ trajectory of success bends upward, especially as compared with his recent life in Greece. And every time questions of expense come up, some consoling dream and compensation occurs (Graverini, Literature 71–72), frst the restoration of his lost possessions and Candidus (11.21.1) and later, grants of presents (11.23.4). Isis promises Lucius success at Rome and his law practice prospers (11.28.6), so that even the unexpected costs of the third initiation are manageable (11.30.2). Despite his devotion to Isis, Lucius still has an interest in lucrum (11.20.3 and 11.207; Keulen, “Lubrico” 36). Lucius starts out as a scholasticus yet to establish himself (2.10.2). Lucius defnes Roman law practice as patrocinia (11.30); thus, Lucius now can perform the “fatherly” role as counsel at Rome. As earlier Milo queried Lucius’ connections to the upper Greco−Roman aristocracy, so now Lucius has an audience with Osiris himself,133 who appoints him pastophor and quinquennial decurion. Lucius fnally can display the joyous face Mithras told him to put on (11.15.4). Lucius would have ft precisely into Juvenal’s image of the ever-adaptable Graeculus, one of those Greeks who came into Rome and took positions of power formerly reserved for true Latins, who overcame their limitations by hard work, Lucius’ laboriosa doctrina. Graverini (Literature 152) suggests that laboriosus translates the Homeric πολύτλας, implying Lucius has acquired Odyssean knowledge through experience; I rather see in it a reference to a quality of Harrison’s “hyperdutiful” priest, who has dedicated himself to the studies of his priestly offce as part of his own self-reformation/self-delusion. But by moving to Rome, Lucius has abandoned Greece, the source of his prosapia vetus, and the security of his Greek identity, to be a permanent, and unloved, alien. In Greece, Lucius has useful connections with family and friends; at Rome, his whole community seems to consist of his fellow Isis-worshippers—recall the doomed Hippolytus’ likewise restricted circle of friends. Lucius’ supposed relation Plutarch describes in (de tranq. anim. 470c) the ferce desire of many elite Greeks for high position in the Roman administration and in de exil. disparages those Greeks who refused the burdens of ruling their native cities and moved to Rome as a more suitable arena for their talents. In the inserted tales, such as that of Aristomenes and Socrates, exile is associated with some evil or disaster. But a full year passes between Lucius’ frst and second initiations (11.26.4), and still things are going well enough. The hardworking prologue narrator apologized for his possible linguistic crudities (note rudis/rudere pun), agreeing with Lucius’ concluding mention of malevolorum diseminationes (11.30). Like the prologue narrator and other provincials, perhaps like Apuleius himself, Lucius is never safe from criticism, and he will never totally belong. Lucius,

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thinking himself protected in the servitium of Isis, has put hardworking self and career enhancement in the service of Rome and Isis above homeland and tradition. As noted, I see Lucius as having been set up to be an object of service and display for Isis as Lucius was earlier set up for the Risus festival, which required for its success Lucius’ torment. His subsequent horrible adventures break and tame Lucius to be the grateful, obedient, self-restrained ass of a problematical Isis at Rome, who will also serve the problematical (but still vast) Roman imperium; Lucius takes pains to point out this collegium is a fairly old Roman tradition founded by Sulla. Thus, this cult is, if anything, Roman—another evidence of Lucian’s new connection with the ruling power. I take Madaurensem (11.27) as a metatexual reference to Apuleius himself. I agree that Lucius accepts the oracle because the priest had the limp predicted in the dream and had no idea what Madaurensem even meant, assuming it had some symbolic meaning. Asinius accepted Lucius as the object of the oracle for similar reasons.134 That Asinus is deformed is another indicator that something is amiss and recalls the lame underworld ass (9.27). Asinius is promised a great reward if he will help Lucius, but money is not specifed; rather, the reward will be to be immortalized as part of Lucius’ story, as Psyche is, which aligns with the other metatexual references (e.g., Diophanes). Apuleius always displayed a playful sense of his own self, and it seems consistent with the prologue’s ambiguities that Apuleius hints that Lucius’ story is in some respects his own story, for he too had many of the same comic hopes, spiritual earnings, carnality, learning and foolishness.

Conclusion: the delusion of the ideal I and my hypothetical reader/interpreter see Apuleius having real feeling and engagement with philosophical and religious questions and with the ideal potentials (as opposed to their disappointing realities) as well as with other cultural and political elements. But Apuleius/the mature Lucius narrator has an equally powerful insight into the folly, corruption, and evil present in human beings and their various institutions. His Metamorphoses is the coming-of-age story of a privileged, desire-blinded and foolish yet gifted young aristocrat whose fawed perceptions and actions cause Lucius to lose himself, wander widely and experience brutal, underworldly adventures until, properly broken, he is saved/selected by Isis to serve her obediently and somewhat blindly, as well as to serve Rome. Her protection or his good luck gives him the reason to have faith in Isis and Rome and to adopt a happy face. Lucius’ rescue is real, as is Isis, as is Rome, but the Metamorphoses reveals that Lucius’ Isis problem is not with corrupt priests, but rather with the fact that the power that Isis/Osiris wield over the cosmic system, like the power the Emperor wields over the imperial system, is arbitrary and permits and even causes varied acts of terrible cruelty. The senior Lucius shows how our innate talent for self-delusion, and perhaps an innate understanding

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that nothing can be done, allows various political and religious ideologies to render this system tolerable, at least to some, for a time. Thus, the sophistic, soft murmurings that accompany the narrator’s horse jumping art make us enjoy this ultimately dark, and perhaps truthful, comedy.

Notes 1 For the Latin, I use the text of Adlington; the English translations are my own. 2 Apuleius composed in numerous genres, including satire; see Flor.27–29. 3 Note the elaborate concern with narrative, the use of ecphrasis, allusions and reworkings (often ironic) of famous literary works; see Harrison, Apuleius 220–35; Walsh 52–63. 4 As Graverini notes, it is uncertain whether Milesian tales always thought erotic (Literature 42–50). See also Tatum, Apuleius 92–104. 5 Lepos is a quality that Apuleius pursues (Tilg, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses 44–47). Note that interpreters, such as Maximus of Tyre (Dissertations 18), also saw Plato as creating slippery, even shameful, arguments, erotikoi logoi; see Ulrich 679. 6 On the comic, see Graverini, Literature 57–58; Shumate 9; Schlam, Metamorphoses. On the spoudaiogeloion tradition, see Giangrande, Use. 7 Graverini, Literature 121, citing Zimmerman, “Echoes” 95 ff. 8 Harrison, Apuleius 139; Mal-Maeder, “Lector” 106; Graverini, Literature 56–59. For the blending of comic and serious elements, see Graverini, Literature 123–26 and 163; Frangoulidis, Roles. 9 Its Platonica allows some meaningful allegory. Note serviles voluptates, central to Lucius’ drama, are linked to Platonic themes, especially those connected to soul’s fall and rise (Graverini, Literature 113–17); concerning serious intentions, see Walsh 176; Wlosok; Habermehl 312. 10 For discussion, Harrison, Apuleius 224; Sandy, Greek World 233–55; Kirichenko. 11 I assume the longer Onos is Lucian’s and that Photius was confused about its less satiric stance; see Winker, Auctor 252–55; Mason, “Fabula” and “Greek and Latin Versions”; Schlam, Metamorphoses 18–28. 12 For anti-Roman sentiment, see particulary Summers. As sometimes proud of his Carthaginian background, see Finkelpearl, “Marsyas”; Bradley, “Law,” “Fictive Families” and “Apuleius.” 13 On Apuleius’ life, see Sandy, Greek World 1–41; Harrison, Apuleius 1–10; La Rocca 20 ff. 14 Role playing was major element in Apuleius self-presentation; see Finkelpearl, “Marsyas” 29–30; Too; Keulen, “Lucius’ Kinship Diplomacy”; La Rocca 43–76. 15 Graverini, Literature 175, citing Apol. 4.1; Hunink, Pro ad. loc. 16 Harrison, Apuleius; Sandy, Greek World. On Apuleius as a cultural mediator see Rosati 282; also Graverini, Literature 207. 17 Graverini and Keulen 206, citing Opeku; also Rosati. 18 Even among North Africans who had shaped themselves according to Roman standards, there still could be local infuences, local pride and conficted views on Rome; see Graverini, Literature 200–04; Bradley, “Apuleius”; Finkelpearl, Metamorphosis 134–40 and “Marsyas”; Hunink, Florida. Selden (“Apuleius”) suggests that Apuleius intentionally crafted the Metamorphoses to be read in different ways by Africans and Romans. 19 Graverini, Literature 202, citing La Rocca 285 ad. loc. 20 Hunink, Florida; Harrison, Apuleius 228–31. 21 Harrison, Apuleius 228 and “Apuleius’ Metamorphoses” 507–16; Winkler, Auctor.

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22 Harrison (“Speaking Book”) suggests it is the book itself speaking, while Winkler (Auctor 203), Dowden (“Prologic”) and Too (129) consider a multiple or aggregate identity. 23 Augustine De civ. D. 18.18, Graverini, Literature 187, citing Carver 163–74. 24 Harrison, Apuleius 217–18 and 228–30; Keulen, “Lubrico” 30–31. 25 Mason, “Fabula”; Keulen, Apuleius 90 ad loc. It is impossible to securely determine how differently our eptomized Onos is from the original. Despite Photius’ testimony, I see no reason to believe the epitome was far more satirical than the original; see Mason, “Greek and Latin Versions” 1675–1707; Winkler, Auctor 252–56. 26 This opening, like L & K’s opening, makes us wonder about the condition of the narrating Lucius. 27 Tilg, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses 133–46. Open-ended endings are more characteristic of comedy; see Montiglio, “You” 110, citing Fusillo, “How” 121; Schmeling, “Satyricon” 360. 28 Graverini, Literature 155–59; Kahane 238; Fowler, “Writing” 228; Smith, “Narrative Voice.” 29 On the echoes of Thucydides in the narrative of their bandit raids, see Loporcaro 65–78. 30 The unnamed companion of Aristomenes notes how his dress and comportment label him as an aristocrat. Fotis likewise complements him; Sandy, “Serviles voluptates” 235–36. 31 Harrison, “Lucius” 7; this statue would refect actual statues erected for Apuleius, the false charges of the Risus festival refecting his own trial. 32 See 1.24.1 and 7.1.5–6; Keulen, “Lubrico” 54. 33 Lucius’ literary allusions and references are fairly trivial and commonplace; Harrison, Apuleius 230; Keulen, “Gellius.” Lucius, of course, thinks himself a real intellectual. 34 Shumate 92, citing Skulsky 94–95. 35 On curiositas, see Hijmans et al., Apuleius Madaurensis, Metamorphoses, Book IX 363–79; DeFilippo; Graverini, Literature esp. 53–61; Schlam, “Curiosity” 120–25; Shumate 219–20. 36 Montiglio, “You” 103; on the quest for philosophic knowledge, see Schlam, Metamorphoses 49. 37 Note how Byrrhaena recognizes him as Helen recognizes Telemachus; Harrison, “Lucius” 11. 38 On the Metamorphoses as presenting Lucius’ various rites of passage, see Habinek. 39 Tilg argues the Onos had a more extensive religious ending (Apuleius’ Metamorphoses 1–14). 40 Mason, “Lucius” 164, citing Strabo 8.6.23; Crinagoras Anth. Gr. 984. 41 Mason, “Lucius” 161, citing Landi 15, n. 2. 42 On the Odyssean character of the Metamorphoses, see Harrison, “Epic Extremities” 243 and Apuleius 223. 43 On Socrates as an important intertextual fgure, see Keulen, “Comic Invention”; Mal-Maeder, “Lector” 97–100; Kenney, “In” 168–69. 44 The boy’s magical emergence (1.4.4–5) during the spectacle may foreshadow how a mystic Isis will later appear. 45 Sandy, “Serviles voluptates”; Graverini, Literature 115–17; Walsh 177. 46 See Smith and Woods 172–95; Keulen, “Comic Invention.” 47 Graverini, Literature 133–40; Shumate 45–48, citing Winkler, Auctor 27–32 and 81–86. 48 For Socrates as Odysseus, see Hunter, Plato 303–05; Smith and Woods 170.

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49 This episode is set in Thessaly; recall how the historical Socrates refused a possible escape to Thessaly (Pl. Cri. 53d ff.); Keulen, “Comic Invention” 110, n. 5. 50 O’Sullivan 207. Note Socrates’ prediction (Pl. Phd 81d—e) that gluttonous souls will be reincarnated as asses; Winkle 98, citing Pottle 86; also Kirichenko 92; Graverini, Literature 127–28. 51 Note ambages reciprocae (11.15) which recalls prior passages (7.15 and 9.11); Penwill, “Ambages.” 52 Recall how Odysseus visits the Cyclops out of curiosity, with disastrous results. 53 See Montiglio, “You” 94; Schlam, Metamorphoses 15. 54 Schmeling and Montiglio 36. Note Lucius’ reaction upon seeing Fotis cooking (2.7 recalls Odysseus’ words upon meeting Nausicaä [Hom. Od. 6.160–61]); Harrison, “Lucius” 12. 55 In De deo Soc. (24), Apuleius sees Odysseus’ guide Hermes in his encounter with Circe as a fgure for a guiding prudentia or logos, which Lucius’ clearly lacks. See Montiglio, “You” 95. 56 Keulen (“Lubrico” 52 and n. 43) suggests that Demeas (1.21.8, 1.22.4 and 1.22.8) is recognized as an important fgure in a power-networks of Corinth. 57 Note, too, the reference to Pasiphae (10.19); see also Frangoulidis, Roles 120 ff.; on legends of Hippolytus reborn, see Fiorencis and Gianotti. 58 Finkelpearl, Metamorphosis 180; This kinship is diplomatic and metamorphorical, not concrete (Keulen “Lucius’ Kinship Diplomacy”), and its inspiration may originate in the Onos, where Lukios’ father is an elegiac poet and a fne mantis; recall Plutarch was a priest of Apollo at Delphi. 59 Mal-Maeder, Apuleius 72–73. Winkler, Auctor 381, n. 75. 60 On Lucius’ possibly pathological devotion to Isis, see Nock 133–55. 61 Note Lucius explicitly states he will not pursue his host’s wife (2.6). 62 Cupid’s palace will recall Byrrhena’s mansion and both recall Homer’s palace of the Phaeacians; see Harrison, “Some Epic Structures” 59. 63 Recalling the Hercules often seen drunk; Harrison, “Epic Extremities” 243–44. 64 On Fotis not being a passive love object, see Schlam, Metamorphoses 71. 65 Lucius pursues magic with the same military desire to not be cowardly as seen in Kleitphon’s pursuit of Leukippe and sex. Fotis’ poses also recall Venus (2.17), and she sexually “rides” him (2.17); see Hinderman; May. 66 It is not clear that Fotis really has made a mistake in giving Lucius the wrong potion. Considering the habits of Lucius’ world, one might suspect Fotis knew she was being used, and this was her revenge. 67 These two sex scenes are considerably more romantic than other accounts of sex; De Smet 613. 68 The story about the stolen pig bristles is suspect; how could Fotis not think Pamphile would not fnd out and punish her? 69 Lucius refers to himself as a sacrifcial victim (e.g., 3.2); for the Risus festival as scapegoat ritual, see James, Unity 87; Finkelpearl, Metamorphosis 87–92; Habinek 54. It seems Petronius’ Encolpius also was made a scapegoat and driven out of Massilia. 70 The Hypatans recognize his repute and great learning, his speech revealing a sophist in the making; Harrison, Apuleius 215–19. 71 On banditry in the Roman world and Apuleius, see Graverini, “Robbers” 90. 72 For example, both sets of bandits wake up at night and go out as ghosts (4.22) and both have scenes of feasting bandits which evoke the Lapiths and Centaurs (4.8); see Winkler, “Lollianos”; Cioff and Trnka-Amrhein; Sandy, “Notes.” 73 The bandit’s discussion on how to punish Charite mimics offcal Roman legal language; see Habinek 65–66. 74 Graverini, “Robbers” 91–92; Walsh 158; Smith, “Style” 1595.

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75 Note how Lucius constantly refers to his indeterminate status as a human mind in an ass’ body; see Shumate 65–66, citing Winkler, Auctor 151–52. 76 König 221. The rugged terrain often fgures the moral danger Lucius is in; see Zimmerman, “On” 91–95. 77 On links between Cupid and Psyche and Metamorphoses, see Smith, “Cupid.” 78 The old woman as narrator, who physically embodies an “old wives tale,” has long been noted (Graverini, “Robbers” 102). But perhaps her brutal mistreatment has driven her to an alcholic madness that can produce consoling fctions. She may a been a Charite long ago. On the anilis fabella in general, see Massaro. 79 Graverini, “Robbers” 101, citing Winkler, Auctor 53; also Graverini, Literature 30–32. 80 Harrison “Epic Extremities”; Finkelpearl, Metamorphosis 115–40; Frangoulidis, “Laughter Festival”; Lazzarini 140–45; Walsh 53–59. 81 For example, as gesticulating senex iratus; Mal-Maeder, “And” 148–51; also May 221–39. 82 See Harrison, “Epic Extremities” 69, citing Kenney, Cupid 217. 83 See Kenney, Cupid. On the links to the Phaedrus and Symposium, see Penwill, “Slavish Pleasures”; Walsh 55 ff.; Dowden, “Cupid”; Shumate 259 ff.; Harrison, Apuleius 252–59; Schlam, Metamorphoses 82–98; Moreschini, Apuleio; Fletcher, Apuleius’ Platonism. 84 On Cupid and Psyche as degraded epic, see Graverini, “Winged Ass”; Harrison, “Some Epic Structures.” Frangoulidis (“Laughter Festival”) and Westerbrink suggest how Apuleius uses epic in a parodic and inverted manner, another way of contrasting the ironic with the ideal. 85 A form of sexual equality appears in Psyche and Charite taking the sort of violent revenge more characteristic of males. Her revenge tale recalls examples of female virtue found in Plutarch, especially the story of the Galatian Camma; see Beneker. 86 Who, signifcantly, walks with Dido in the Vergilian Underworld (Aen. 6.447). 87 Frangoulidis, “Charite’s Literary Models” 439–40. Dido also worships dead Sychaeus as a statue. Hijmans provides numerous comparanda on this cult from life and literature (“Charite”). 88 Lateiner, “Tlepolemus” 230; Winkler, Auctor 45 and 156. Charite, in turn, in her self-abuse and wish to die recalled the Widow; see Ciaff; also Finkelpearl, Metamorphoses 145. 89 See Hunter, Plato 187. Note the blinded Thrasyllus, instead of becoming a cursing, vengeful Polymestor, offers himself as a human sacrifce to the couple’s spirits (8.13). Villains are redeemed by contact with the protagonists, and here Thrasyllus offers them a kind of justice. 90 Graverini, Literature 196–97; Horsfall, 138–44; Finkelpearl, Metamorphosis 115–48. The Aeneid implies that the widowed Dido should have stayed an avowed univira loyal to Sychaeus (Verg. Aen. 1.718—22 and 4.15 ff.), devoted to his shrine (4.457–58) as well as to Carthage, to whom she is, in a sense, married; but while Dido is obsessed with Aeneas, work on Carthage stops. 91 The villagers who attack (8.17) are thought to recall the Laestrygonians in Book 10 of the Odyssey, but also evoke barbarians rolling down rocks on Xenophon’s retreating army (An. 4.2.3—5). 92 Graverini, Literature 79–81; see also Hijmans et al., Apuleius Madaurensis, Metamorphoses, Book VIII 287–98; and Hijmans, “Signifcant Names” 112. 93 The dialogue begins: Philebus says that to all living beings enjoyment and pleasure and gaiety and whatever accords with that sort of thing are a good; whereas our contention is that not these, but wisdom and thought and memory and their kindred, right opinion and true reasonings . . . (Pl. Phlb. 11b)

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see Graverini, Literature 67; Fowler, Statesman, 208) 94 For more on Cybele worship in respect to evolving Roman masculinities, see Latham. 95 There are inconsistencies regarding the soldier’s rank and military unit; nevertheless, the scene captures the brutalities and rapaciousness that many Roman subjects experienced; Millar, “World” 68; Graverini, Literature 196; Summers 526. 96 Penwill, “On” 87, citing Finkelpearl, Metamorphosis 156. 97 Penwill “Slavish Pleasures” 49–82 and “On” 85–108; Seelinger 361–67; Schlam, Metamorphoses 73. 98 Frangoulidis, “From” 117. The two episodes echo each other; see Keulen, “Lubrico” 32–33. 99 Mason, “Lucius” 162; Schlam, Metamorphoses 37. For a contrary view, see Nethercut 124–25; Skulsky 74. 100 The deadly passion of Psyche’s sisters is likewise described as vesania (5.11) and vesanae (5.27). 101 Apuleius commissioned a small silver statue to carry around for his personal devotions. He instructed an artisan to make an image of whatever god he desired, which Apuleius then worshipped with the usual fervor (Apol. 61). 102 In Flor. 4, Apuleius calls such spectacles munera nostra, presenting Apuleius as a fan of such events, like these Carthaginians; see Bradley, “Apuleius” 13. 103 See Finkelpearl, “Judgment” 233–34, following Schlam, “Sex” 103–04. 104 On his outburst regarding corrupt judges, see Sandy, “Book” 123. 105 See Zimmerman, Apuleius 26; Frangoulidis, Roles 154–55 and “From” 120. 106 See Shumate; Bøgh. Many scholars dismiss notions of Lucius’ undergoing a meaningful conversion, for example, Schlam, Metamorphoses 9; Kenney, “In.” Nock (7–8) defned conversion as “fnding a new spiritual home,” understanding previously unknown truths, an ecstasy of happiness, a new start and a new faith. There is a considerable element of what Nock calls “adhension” in what happens to Lucius, rather than a deeper conversion, which, as MacMullen (Christianizing) suggests, was probably the norm for most Christian converts. 107 Emotions, often in fux, are an important driver for Lucius’ turn to Isis; see Weiss 94; Schmeling and Montiglio. 108 Ulrich thinks that he choses to embrace Socrates as a model for life; I believe instead that he realizes that he needs to abandon the sort of false judgments that brought himself to ruin. 109 On Book 11’s religiousity, see Grimal; Griffths; Beck, “Mystery Religions” 146–50; as ballast, Perry, Ancient Romances 242–45; Harrison, Apuleius 238–59. 110 Dowden, “Cupid” 13; Graverini, Literature 95, who suggests Odyssey Book 13 and Odysseus waking up on Ithaka as a possible intertext. 111 Isis may already beginning to make him human; see Finkelpearl, Metamorphosis 204, citing Laird 148–49. Lucius’ seaside prayer also recalls the prayer of Achilles to Thetis, and Telemachus’ prayer to Athena (Hom. Od. 2.262). Or this prayer may be part of a dream. 112 Penwill sees Lucius making a genuine philosophic/religious gesture as he prays to the risen moon (“On” 96). But Lucius’ evocation of Pythagoras (11.1) need not refect deep beliefs, although Schlam (“Platonica” 480) sees a connection between metamorphoses and the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls; also Kirichenko 106–07. 113 On the constant theme of poverty of Lucius’ language to express his devotion to Isis, see Keulen, “Lubrico” 45–47. 114 MacMullen, Christianizing 29–34; also Frend. 115 See Bøgh 278–84, citing Bricault 2:584–85 (inscription 503/1115) for evidence of a personal “call” from the god. 116 Keulen noted that Lucius earlier proved himself useful to the god of Laughter through rhetoric during the Risus festival (“Lubrico” 31).

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117 Bradley, Apuleius 102–03, citing Martin, Providentia plate 2, n. 85; also Polito 566. 118 Harrison,“Epic Extremities” 239; Mal-Maeder, “Lector” 106; Graverini, Literature 56–59. 119 Hindermann 80, citing Wlosok; Penwill, “Slavish Pleasures”; Mal-Maeder, Apuleius 401. 120 While this idea of military service is seen in Isis worship (Griffths 254), it is more evident among Christians, and Hindermann (81) correctly sees a connection to love elegy. 121 Harrison, Apuleius 241–43, who cites Fick-Michel. 122 On the foolish Lucius being duped by corrupt priests, see Mal-Maeder, “Lector” and Apuleius 14–16 and 409–11; also Harrison, Apuleius 235–59. The very name Mithras seems suspect (Winkler, Auctor 245–47), but as Graverini shows (Literature 64–69), there could be contact between the two cults, and we recall Sisimithres in Heliodorus, whose name combines Isis and Mithras. 123 Recall in the Aithiopika, Kalasiris, Charikleia and Theagenes form a spiritual family. 124 On the topos of a god inspiring a philosopher or orator, see Keulen, “Lubrico” 45–46. 125 This was not a customary practice of Isis worshippers, but done to remain close to the protective goddess. Isis demands sedulis obsequiis and chastity (11.6), that he show unswerving devotion for his remaining life (11.15, 11.19 and 11.25); Bradley, Apuleius 209. 126 Hindermann 81, citing Egelhaaf-Gaiser, Kulträume 442. 127 Harrison, Apuleius 246–48; Weiss 83–94; Murgatroyd 320–21. 128 For discussion, see Penwill, “Ambages”; Schmeling and Montiglio. 129 Note he characterizes his desires as immaturis (11.21.3). Keulen, “Lubrico” 36–38. 130 And, as noted, Socrates was also bald and comic; on Lucius’ baldness, see Keulen, “Lubrico” 35; Graverini, Literature 82–89 with further bibliography. 131 The text stresses purity in terms food and drink, ritual cleanliness and moral (but not sexual) purity; see Keulen, “Lubrico” 35. 132 Perhaps Apuleius mocks the religiosity of Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales; see Harrison, Apuleius 240; Winkler, Auctor 215; Griffths 152; Zimmerman, “Echoes” 103. 133 That Osiris seems to get hardly any description compared to Isis, I think has more to do with Lucius’ mother orientation; see also Hunink, “Dreams” 29; Watson, “Dreams” 137–38. 134 Drawing from Graverini (Literature 187–88), I suspect that it is a nod to his North African audience; the admodum pauperem would refer to the younger Apuleius, who then was a pauper, not in money, but in fame. Apuleius, like Lucius, was once as a young man helped by divinity, fgured by Isis, when he came to Rome. I assume the average reader of Apuleius’ day would have seen it as somehow connecting Lucius the character with Apuleius, which aligns with how many readers (like Augustine) thought Apuleius was presenting his work as somehow autobiographical. See Harrison, Apuleius 228 ff.; Paardt, “Unmasked ‘I’” 98–102.

8

A brief concluding postscript

This book was not constructed to build toward the revelation of mysteries. Its central purpose was to offer methods for analyzing the ideal in our “ideal” novels, and to demonstrate the usefulness of these methods through the production of analysis and readings of individual novels. This has been done, and now, you, most gentle readers, must decide to what extent I have accomplished my aims. Here, I will simply offer some retrospective thoughts, suggestions for future work and a polemic on my purposes. Clearly, notions of the ideal, like those of religion, philosophy, beauty and love, are bound up with cultural/historical backgrounds and individual tastes. Opinions on these matters can be intensely polarized. Even when an ideal element is recognized, different critics will discount it or embrace it, sometimes making it a “hermeneutic key”, sometimes an example of “false consciousness.” There is no resolution to this dilemma. The best that can be done is to use sound scholarly methods to produce evidence that some individuals and cultures recognized and responded to items in humanistic productions as ideal and to use that evidence to produce coherent insights and interpretations of those productions. In my view, regarding the ancient novels, the ideal has been best studied with respect to archetypal patterns, revisions of myth, evocations of philosophy and especially religion and, of course, the protagonists’ incredible loyalty amid dangerous amatory adventures in strange lands. But even here, more work could be done along the lines of Porter’s and Zeitlin’s scholarship regarding how iconic fragments, whether material or literary, properly evoked, could create a sense of a possible, better world. While the issue of identity has gotten considerable attention, the focus has been on identity as performative or as a matter of self-categorization. But, to me, Lacan reveals this struggle as part of a far deeper (perhaps impossible and tragic) search for identity and the fulfllment of our desire to locate some suffcient self and secure identity. And this search connects to so much else, for example, how the multiple persons who fall in love with the protagonists are an inverse fgure for our own process of constant misidentifcation of ideal items of desire and how erotic aggression is connected to the need to be the complete desire of an other. Action in the political realm is much bound up with struggles DOI: 10.4324/9781003036647-8

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over the word of the father. Yet the female, outside the patriarchal symbolic system, can offer ideal alternatives to the masculinist order. More, too, can be done on how the literary, religious and erotic sublime interpenetrate. While, especially in the Latin novels, good work has been done on how the novels refect specifc political realities and ideologies, these elements need to be further connected with historical processes of cultural and political change, with realizable anticipations of something better, with the Not Yet. For me, this book’s goals form part of a wider project to rehabilitate a way of reading literary and cultural productions. Utopia now seems a discredited notion, being “no place,” despite Oscar Wilde’s dictum;1 see Russell Jacoby’s The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy. Clearly, irony permeates much of contemporary thinking and cultural production and, needless to say, utopian notions are a tempting target for ironic comments. Such negativity is understandable, considering the failures of movements that many had pinned utopian hopes on — ponder the shift of religion from matters of salvation to lifestyle and therapeutic concerns, the oppressions of global capitalism, the destruction and dehumanization that often accompanies technology, the hopelessness still existing despite the existence of the welfare state and some truly astounding technological developments. Many cultural critics believe this tendency to irony and parody exerts a widespread, corrosive effect on public discourse. What has been forgotten or reduced to the value of a sentimental gesture is the abiding utopian impulse within human beings. It is not merely the sunny attitude of Julian of Norwich’s “all manner of things shall be well”; rather, the human mind, which has evolved and advanced to its (sometimes dubious) mastery of its world, has done so due to its ability to imagine and then produce solutions to problems both material and psychic. Thus, I think all theorizing that deals with questions of how humanistic productions (such as novels) relate to life as human beings understand it, is weakened without a comprehensive view of human life in all its interior richness, which include ideal anticipations. These anticipations are grounded in historical reality; many aspects of our own world would be wildly utopian to a yeoman farmer of 1600 CE France. And it is more than a question of new technology bringing increased material prosperity. The ideal and utopian imagination, drawing on both internal and external sources, roughs out what a truly human society and world would consist of in terms of our relationships to our private, secret selves, to each other and even to the natural world. The products of the utopian imagination, like the productions of dreaming, thus unveil an important dimension of our mental constitution and, properly contemplated, help us better understand how we truly desire to exist and what we truly wish to become. Modern psychologizing constantly proclaims the evils that arise from repressing aspects of personality, especially sexual ones. I would argue that social as well as individual progress has been hampered by a lack of understanding of the full concreteness, depth and power of the utopian impulse. For example, as scholars in the Judeo-Christian tradition

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search for the “historical” Moses, the Kingdom of Solomon, the real life and sayings of Jesus, the Resurrection, they tend to fnd less real “history” and more of something that resembles myth and saga. As Aristotle sensed, poetry, by being less rooted in the real and in specifc needs, can be free to express more universal perspectives. The same holds true for romance as Epic for Everyman. By looking closely at how ideal elements permeate all cultural productions, even the most anti-utopian and cynical, we can observe an impulse, like that of the desire for freedom, that constantly urges us toward that truly human world. As Bloch and others have pointed out, successful promulgators of otherwise horrible ideologies (e.g., Nazis) were (are?) often successful because they made use of such entrancing, utopian elements. The anagogic level of criticism, when applied to the study of ideal elements, reveals how a specifc literary work manifests that wide and deep impulse toward a truly human society. My postulated critical method would encourage readers to see that impulse and its processes at work in themselves and their society. Such forms of criticism make us more aware of this dimension of the great human dialogue which all artistic productions, taken together, form. And comprehending this presence, we can be more confdent in our hopes and efforts to create that more human world. To help reawaken this principle of hope is one of the goals of this book.

Note 1 “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” See Murray 16.

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Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to fgures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Achilles Tatius 1, 3, 4, 8, 11, 11n3, 18, 19, 20, 23, 26, 30, 32, 36, 38, 40, 53, 59, 61, 62, 67, 72n35, 75n111, 116, 122, 183, 205–9, 220, 225, 226n25, 228n56; see also Leukippe and Kleitophon (L & K) Acts of Paul and Thecla 11n3, 31, 54, 201n84 Aelius Aristides 31 Aeneas 10, 17, 20, 24, 37, 83, 98, 164, 173, 174, 190, 236, 239, 240, 242, 246, 249, 250 Aeneid (Vergil) 37, 83, 164, 200n73, 239, 240, 246, 250 Aithiopika (Heliodorus) 3, 8, 10, 22, 31–2, 56, 62; anagogy 170–73; apocalypse 170–73; archetypes 170–73; aretalogies 170–73; bandits 168, 177; “black blood” 193; canonical myth 168–9; chastity and devotion 175, 179; communal identity 194; descent and ascent 173–5; divine intervention 193; erotic events 175; Ethiopia 162, 165, 166, 173, 192; feminine wisdom 192; human behaviors and classes 178; illegitimacy 176; Kalasiris 184–9; Mendacity 174; Meroitic barbarism 169; Meroitic culture 195; Meroitic society 169; mysteriosophic language 163; Persinna 179–80; political activity 193; political- and religious-historical level 162; political-historical options 164–8; religion and philosophy 169–70; religiose 163; self-knowledge 178; sexual desire 176; sexual transgression 193; supernatural warnings and

interventions 163; Theagenes 180–4; trial scenes 191; utopian in 196; virginity 177, 188 akolastoi 8, 47, 62, 135, 151, 215, 240 Alexander the Great 28, 38, 164 Alexander Romance 19, 172, 189 amatory bond: career of desire 103; coercion and deception 105; erotic emotionalism 102; midlife crisis 104; Plutarch 102; self-control 102; sexual exploitation of slaves 46, 101 Andromeda 218 antisocial behaviors 56 Anyte 8 Aphrodisias 86, 88, 89, 98, 109n28, 111n54 Aphrodite 25, 27–30, 33, 45, 51, 53, 54, 56, 62, 67, 69, 73n53, 79, 82–5, 93, 96, 98, 100, 103, 104–7, 114n115, 124, 127, 133, 142, 149, 177, 206, 208, 212, 214, 216–18, 222, 224, 225, 228, 245 Apollonius King of Tyre 24, 26, 53, 54 Apuleius 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 23, 31, 40, 117–18; see also Metamorphoses (Apuleius) Ariston 24, 40, 81, 84, 94, 95, 97 Aristotle 9, 37, 269 Arsake 17, 22, 62, 71n33, 164, 165, 174, 175, 183, 184, 191, 194, 201n100 Artaxates 81, 88, 89, 91–3, 96, 104, 107, 110n50, 112n70, 165 Artaxerxes 23, 31, 62, 80, 82, 83, 88, 89, 91–4, 99–101, 103, 104, 107, 109n25, 110n44, 111n59, 167, 198n32 Artemis 23, 24, 34, 62, 72n45, 79, 82, 86, 93, 142, 169, 171, 176, 186, 187, 190, 193, 206, 213–18, 220–4, 227, 240, 241

310

Index

Arthur’s Round Table 17 As You Like It (Shakespeare) 26 Athenophilic values 94 autoekdosis 53, 106 Babylon 23, 27, 28, 32, 80–2, 89–94, 101, 105, 107, 112, 138, 154, 165 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich 8–9 Ballengee, Jennifer R. 58 Balzac 16, 40 Beck, Roger 1 believability/plausibility 2 Bildungsroman 10 biography 38 Blake, William 15 Bloch, Ernst 3, 14, 15, 40, 42, 133; Front or Novum 44; inescapable utopian dimension 42–4 Bowie, Ewen L. 32 Brown, Norman O. 59 Buchan, Mark 63 bucolic poetry 125 Burkert, Walter 82, 109n18, 197n18 Byrrhaena 237, 240, 242–3, 262n37 Callirhoe (Chariton) 3, 8, 10, 27–9, 32, 40, 150; amatory bond 101–5; Aphrodisias 89; Artaxerxes 91–3; autoekdosis 106; canonical myths 108; civic harmony 80; civic life 95; coming-of-age/descent–ascent journey 80; democratic processes 90; double vision 100; events 80; gnomai 87; “god among mortals” 82; Hellenic power 81; humanity benefts 83; Kore archetype 85; marvelous child pattern 86; Medea myth 85; Mithridates 88, 91, 100, 107; modus vivendi 99–100; oppressive democracy 87; paideia 99; passivity and emotionalism 84; Persian satrapy 88; Pharnaces 88; political process 94; Quest archetype 84; Roman piratical imperialism 99; Second Sophistic 79; Sicilian expedition 96; social hierarchy 94; social orders 95; sociopolitical circumstances 86; testing and development 105–8; utopian theme 97; virgin goddesses 86 canonical myth 168–9 Cassirer 14, 15 Chaereas 9, 10, 12n25, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27–31, 33, 34, 40, 53–6, 59, 60, 62, 68, 79–87, 89, 91, 93, 95–108, 112n78,

113n94, 138, 144, 166, 168, 170, 194, 196, 214, 215, 217, 221, 223 Chaireas 93, 215, 222, 224; see also Achilles Tatius character development 8–10 Charikleia 4, 10, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 46, 162, 171–7, 181–2, 185–7, 190–1 Charite−Tlepolemus−Thrasyllus episodes 249 Chariton 3, 4, 9, 14; see also Callirhoe (Chariton) chastity and devotion 11n3, 25, 45, 56, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62, 68, 77n146, 80, 84, 104, 105, 107, 174–6, 179, 185, 207, 211, 214–16, 241, 247, 251, 259 chivalric romance 14 Chloeomachy 137, 141, 145 “Christian” myth 14 “Christian” novellas 31 C. Julius Zoilus 88 comic paradigms 17, 24, 25, 27, 38, 41, 68, 79, 83, 86, 117, 132, 151, 207, 211, 224, 225, 231, 234, 260 Concordia/Homonoia 47 Connors, Catherine 98 cultural memory 7 Cyropaedia (Xenophon) 38, 92; Augustus Caesar 8, 98, 99, 250; Callisthenes 215; Charikles 28, 164, 169, 170, 172, 177, 179, 180, 184, 188, 195; Corinth 235–41, 244, 247, 251–5; Cupid 26, 60, 234, 236, 246–9; Julius Caesa 98 Daphnis and Chloe (D & C) 3–6, 8, 14, 34, 60, 120, 145–6, 220; anagogy 117; apocalyptic/eschatological narrative 122; autumn 143; career of desire 134–6; Chloeomachy 137, 141, 145; Chloe’s origins 154; city party 150–3; dangerous heat 148–9; didactic program 115; Dionysiac mode 145; emotional freedom 135; empathy 136–9; equality 136–9; erasure 136–9; Eros 5, 154, 155; erotic education 139; extensive pastoral world 122–34; fall and Philetas’ great revelation 143–4; female and male relationship 212; frst spring 139–40; frst threats 140–1; Greco-Roman culture 116; high summer and darker tones 141–2; ideal pastoral myth 121–2; identity, revised 153–4; imitations and allusions 6, 61, 206, 240; intertextuality 115;

Index invasions 144–5; Lesbian city-states 116; longing and invention 146–7; love 5, 140; marvelous children 118, 119; maturity of 116–17; mutual empathy 137; mythic paradigms 119–21; mythos and logos 5, 115, 117; new identity limitations 153; new spring, more sexual excitement and more learning 147–8; Orphic themes 35; Pan 145–6; pastoral joke 141; philosophoi 34; Platonic tradition 5, 22, 34, 35, 50, 60; religious themes 162; romance vision 17; rustic marriage and life after marriage 154–5, 154–5; Second Sophistic 4–5, 7, 8, 79, 115, 116, 122, 127, 168, 205, 209; sexual excitement 147; sexual identity 116; spiritual reality 119; suitors threat 149–50; symbolic-mythical roles 120; Syrinx myth 146, 213; therapeutic and educational powers 117; transgressive Methymnaean youths 118; unharmonized love 132; utopian nature 156 Daphnis myth 22–3 David Copperfeld (Dickens) 10 De Domo (Lucian) 6, 119 Defoe, Daniel 14 Demeter-Kore myth 22, 30–1 Demetrius 34–5 demonic epiphany 20 Demosthenes 7 descent/ascent themes 22–6, 28, 81, 173–5, 236, 244 desire: illimitable desire 3, 61, 235 Dickens, Charles 10 Dionysius 9, 23, 27–9, 31, 53, 58, 69, 80–2, 85–92, 94, 95, 97, 100, 102–8, 133, 151, 231, 217, 218 Dionysophanes 136, 150–2, 154 Dio of Prusa 6–7, 34, 36, 89, 94, 122 Echo myth 121, 126, 128, 139 Eclogues (Vergil) 132 Egger, Brigitte Maria 52, 53 Egypt 22; Charikleia’s spiritual pursuit 184; cosmic order 189; Delphic community 29; demonic underworld 165, 171, 173; divine machinery 186; Egyptian magic 184; Heliodorus’ fantasy 165, 170; historical background 164; nonGreek components 97; Oedipus-andOdysseus ending 186; Ploiaphesia

311

ceremony 257; political-historical options 164; post mortem 186; virtual Deadland 165 Egyptian Rebellion 84, 90, 93, 100, 102 Elsom, Helen E. 52 Emesa 166, 169, 170 empathy 136–9 energeia 6 Ephesiaka (Xenophon) 1, 11n3, 26, 71n26, 76n118, 104, 199 Ephesian virginity test 171, 214, 218, 220 Epicureanism 57 Epithalamium of Honorius and Maria (Claudian) 31 equality 136–9 erasure 134, 136–9, 152, 222 Eroticus 35, 47, 49, 50, 134, 208 Ethiopia 162, 165, 166, 173, 192 Ethiopian myth 37 ethnography 38 ethos 15 Euboean Oration (Dio) 122 Europa myth 23, 207, 208, 221, 227n33, 228n44, 248 fact vs. fantasy, barriers 4 false consciousness 38 false deaths 25, 28, 61, 210, 214 family life 3, 44–7, 53–4, 101 Faust myth 241 feminine wisdom 192 folktale-derived Odysseus 37 Fotis 236, 239, 242, 243, 252, 256, 258 Fortuna 243, 247 Frazier, James George 14, 25 Freud 14, 63 Front or Novum (Bloch) 44 Frye, Northrop 2, 3, 15, 55, 63, 70n6, 123, 167; Anatomy of Criticism 14–16, 20, 25; archetypal romance/quest 71n21; coming-of-age narratives/quests 20–2; descent and ascent motifs 22–6; method 15; mythoi, theory of phases 14–15, 16–20; recovery of myth 14–15; Secular Scripture 14, 17, 18, 22–6, 28, 81, 214; vision of romance 16 gender issues 39, 54–5 geography 22, 38, 46; real and symbolic geography 22 gig economy 156 Gnathon 22, 27, 36, 62, 129, 131, 133, 135, 138, 151–3, 235 goddess among mortals pattern 27–8

312 Index Gordon 39 Gorgias 5 Greco-Roman cultural 55, 240; Aeneid 37, 83, 164, 200n73, 239, 240, 246, 250; Aithiopika 3, 8, 10, 22, 31–2, 56, 62; Alexander Romance 19, 172, 189; Apollonius King of Tyre 24, 26, 53, 54; Bildungsroman 10; Callirhoe (Chariton) 3, 8, 10, 27–9, 32, 40, 150; Daphnis and Chloe (D & C) 3–6, 8, 14, 34, 60, 120, 145–6, 220; David Copperfeld 10; Epithalamium of Honorius and Maria 31; Front or Novum 44; Homeric Hymn 128–9; Leukippe and Kleitophon (L & K) 3, 14; Metamorphoses (Apuleius) 3, 4, 10, 20, 24, 34, 35, 55, 117, 205; Odyssey 2, 5, 20; Phaedrus 55, 61, 238, 246; phantasia 5–6, 60; Pilgrim’s Progress 33; Symposium 170–1, 190, 246; Wonders Beyond Thule 24; As You Like It 26 Greek New Comedy 16–17, 45 Gymnosophists 167, 169, 185, 190–2 Hall, Edith “ass with double vision” 41, 236–7 Hebrew myth 14 Heliodorus 3, 4, 6, 10, 14, 17, 19, 22, 26, 31, 40; see also Aithiopika (Heliodorus) Helios (Sun god) 169, 170, 176, 177 Hellenic literary tradition 4 Heracles myth 20 Hermocrates 40, 53, 56, 68, 69, 80, 81, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 94–9, 104, 108, 166, 167, 194, 221, 223 Herrmann, Fritz-Gregor 124 Hesiod 33 heteroglossia, inherent 2, 3–4 Historia Augusta 57 historical–cultural contexts 2 historical novels 14 Homer as Egyptian 7, 8, 11, 36, 37, 39, 45, 47, 48, 57, 63, 127, 133, 164, 166, 168, 184–8, 193, 237, 239 Homeric Hymn 128–9 homonoia 49 Hopkins, Gerald Manley 14 Hunter, Richard L. 10 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 57 hybridity 2, 4 Hypata town 182–3, 235, 240–4, 252, 254–7

ideal elements 1, 2 idealized female: Christian communities 52; gender roles and identifcation 52; male-oriented power relations 52; selfess fdelity 51; sexual violence 52 ideal pastoral myth 121–2 identity 10–11 illimitable desire 61 implied/ideal reader 4 Inanna-Ishtar’s descent 28 interlacement 19 Isocrates 7, 9; Apuleius 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 23, 26, 28, 30–2, 230–61; Ideal Reader notion 4, 70n4; idealized heroine 51–3; Isis 4, 25, 32, 34, 38, 55, 169, 176, 177, 184, 190, 196, 205, 231, 233, 235, 236, 239–44, 247, 250, 260; Osiris 25, 48, 50, 176, 177, 196, 203n140, 241, 255, 259, 266n133; Wolfgang Iser 70n4 Jacoby, Felix 38 James, Henry 14 Jameson, Fredric 3; artistic productions 42; cultural revolution 41; dialectical analysis 40; Marxist theory 39; political unconscious 39; postmodernism 39; social formations 40–1; socially symbolic act 39; structural coexistence 41; utopian surplus 40 Janan, Micaela Wakil 62–3 Judeo-Christian tradition 268–9 Juno 246 Jupiter 164, 232, 240, 246, 247, 249 Kalasiris 24, 25, 29, 162, 165, 172, 174–8, 183–9, 184–9 Kallisthenes 215–216 Kleitophon 35, 36 Knemon 173–4, 178, 183 Konstan, David 57–8 Kore archetype 85 Lacanian imaginary 135 Lacanian objet a 64–5 Lacanian theory 3, 62–3; Big Other 65, 126; Lacanian Sublime 2, 4–7, 22, 36, 38, 44, 65, 69, 115, 119, 129, 133, 134, 136, 155, 268;With Lacan 10, 14, 39, 63, 65–9, 297; Realm of the Imaginary 64; realm of the Symbolic 135 Lacan, Jacques 7, 14; “name of the father” 67; Symbolic realm 65, 66 Lamon 145

Index language 15, 65–6 latency concept 75 Lauwers, Jeroen 118 Lawrence, David Herbert 57 Lentricchia, Frank 16 Leukippe and Kleitophon (L & K) 3, 14; Andromeda 218, 247; anti-Phaedrus 208; archetypal patterns 209–11; desire and pathologies 211–215; Ephesian virginity test 218; Eros’ cosmic power 207; erotikos 207; Euthydikos myth 218; ideal elements 205; Kallisthenes 215–216; Melite 216–218; non-ideal narratives 205; parthenos 205; political unconscious 220–21; pro- traditional values 207; pseudo-sacrifce 219; Second Sophistic literary practice 205; stages 221–5 Leven, Pauline A. 219 linguistic/semiotic structures 65 Longinus 5–6, 7 Longus 3, 4, 6, 10, 14, 19, 21–2, 26 (see also Daphnis and Chloe (D & C)); bucolic poetry 125; career of desire 134–6; Desire 128; Eros conceptions 130–1; Euboean Oration (Dio) 122; history 132–3; human sensibilities 123; love and desire 126; nymphinfused pastoral world 126–7; ornamental garden 129–30; paideia 133; pastoral location 124; pseudodocumentarianism 132–3; quasi-divine shepherds 124; Second Sophistic 122; semi-imaginable vision 134; social reality 132; Symposium 127, 131, 118 love at frst sight 9, 35, 45, 59, 101, 170, 175, 186, 213, 219 Lucian 10, 31; De Domo 6, 119; Onos 232, 233, 236, 240, 243, 250, 251, 254 Lucius 10, 230–4, 247, 253–6 Macrobius 4 Madaurensem 260 Marcuse, Herbert 59 marital harmony 50–1 marvelous child 26–7, 118, 119 Marxist-oriented criticism 38 Marxist theory 39 Marx, Karl 9 Medea myth 85, 181 medieval romance 14, 16 Megacles (Chloe’s real father) 120, 136, 152, 154 Melite 216–218

313

Memnon (Heliodorus) 166 Memphis 165 Mendacity 174 Meroe 4, 20, 26, 34, 35, 37, 60, 68, 121, 162–4, 166, 167, 169–73, 177, 179, 182, 185, 190, 195 Meroitic barbarism 169 Meroitic culture 195 Meroitic society 169 Merotic religion/theosophy 255 Metamorphoses (Apuleius) 3, 4, 10, 20, 24, 34, 35, 55, 117, 205; Aeneid features 246; Apology 231; archetypes 235–7; bandits 244–5; Charite− Tlepolemus−Thrasyllus episodes 249; cultural capital 231; Cupid and Psyche fable 230, 236, 245, 246; curiositas 234; desire 234–5; divine providentia 255; elements 231; emotional level 254; extravagant lifestyle 234; Greco−Roman realities 236–7; halfNumidian, half-Gaetulian identity 232; hospitality 239; human selfdelusion 245; imperium 232, 249, 260; Isis-worship 257; kinship diplomacy 233; Madaurensem 260; malevolorum diseminationes 259–60; mountaintop experience 245; multiscius 239; Nilotic reed 232; Odysseus 237, 239, 242; Onos 233, 240, 243, 250; patrocinia 259; pepaideumenos 237; Phaedrean cicadas 238; Phaedrean Socrates 235; Phaedrus 238, 246; Phoinikika 245; Polyxena 247; pseudo-Haemus 237; quest/journey pattern 236; Risus festival 244; “salvation” narrative 255–6; self-delusion 260–1; serviles voluptates 238; spoudaiogeloion tradition 231; supernatural powers 254; Symposium 246; vesana 252; violence and sexuality 252; wealth and poverty 233, 237 Methymna and Mytilene 27, 133, 138, 151, 154 Miletus (city in Chariton) 80, 82, 88, 89, 90, 98, 209 Milesian tale 56, 106, 231, 232, 245 Miller, Paul Allen 62–3 Milo (Apuleius) 20, 34, 236, 237, 242–4, 259 Mithras 234, 244, 256–8 Mithridates 88, 91, 100, 107 Morgan, John R. 10, 31–2 Morrison, Toni 32

314 Index Musonius’ feminism 48; marriage as breathing together 48, 138 mythic themes, pattern 20 mythography 38 mythoi of comedy (Frye): cultural productions 19; Daphnis and Chloe (D & C) 3–6, 8, 14, 34, 60, 120, 145–6, 220; Euboean Oration (Dio) 122; Greek New Comedy 16–17; interlacement 19; Metamorphoses 3, 4, 10, 20, 24, 34, 35, 55, 117, 205; myths of freedom 15; phases of mythoi 18–20; quest-pattern adventures 18; romance narrative 17; romance segments 18; Symposium 127, 131, 118 mythos vs. logos 5 “myths of concern” 15 myth revised 37 myth-symbolic structuralist criticism: archetypal elements 13–14; chivalric romance 14; Demeter-Kore myth 30–1; historical novels 14; language 13; “marvelous child” 26–7; medieval romance 14; mythoi (Frye) 13; recovery of 14–15; story types 13 Nachleben 2 Neoplatonic/Neopythagorean theosophy 166 Neoptolemus (son of Achilles) 37, 171, 181, 182; ancestor of Theagenes 24, 162, 164, 171, 172, 180–4, 191, 194, 195 Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic philosophy 32 Nile 162, 164, 169, 171, 173, 178, 186 non-ideal novels 1 Not-Yet 43 Oedipus at Colonus 37, 103, 178, 186, 188–90 Odysseus myth 10, 20 Odyssey 2, 5, 20 Oedipus complex 67 Origen 14 Ovid 28 paideia 3, 9, 36, 116, 133, 135 Pamphile (in Apuleius) 240–3, 263n68 pantarbe stone 165, 174, 175, 179, 193 Paulsen, Thomas 184 Pausanias 7–8, 16 Pelorus (Heliodorus) 173, 175, 177, 180 Peregrinus proteus 184, 202n119

Perkins (Suffering Self) 39 Perry, Ben Edwin 1 Perseus 26, 34, 37, 167, 169–71, 179, 180, 182, 193–5, 206, 209, 218, 219 Persia 20, 23, 24, 28, 34, 40, 41, 83, 87–91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 164–6 Persian despotism 165 Persinna 162, 179–80 Petronius 4; Satyrica 11n3, 205, 234 Phaeacian tales 5 Phaedrean cicadas 238 Phaedrean Socrates 235 Phaedrus 55, 61, 238, 246 phantasia 5–6, 60 Pharnaces (Chariton) 88, 91, 110n44 Phatta 23, 121, 126, 128, 132, 139, 141, 142, 143, 148 Philetas (poems of Theocritus) 58, 143–4 philosophical elements 31, 32, 34, 231 philosophy 34–6 Philostratus 6 Phoenicians 209, 220; Tyre 209 Phoinikika 245 physical virginity 19, 22, 23, 28, 28, 35, 46, 54, 58, 59, 103, 137, 149, 153, 173, 176, 178, 179, 188, 215, 217, 218, 222–4 Pilgrim’s Progress 33 Pitys myth 128 Plangon 52, 89, 106 Plato 5, 14, 37, 48, 55, 61, 129–31, 180 Platonism 34, 35 Plutarch 3, 45, 47, 92, 166–167; amatory bond 102; emotional interchange 51; Eroticus 50; homonoia 49; license and public activity 49; marital harmony 50–1; sexual activity 49–50; sexual love 51; spiritual symbiosis 48; Stoics 49 political unconscious 38–44, 39 Polyxena 247 Porter, James I. 7, 8, 16, 37–8, 63, 267 Progymnasmata 5 Psammetichus 121 pseudo-documentarianism 132–3 psychoanalytic theory 59 psychological complexity 9 Pygmalion 28 Queen Candace myth 166 Rank, Otto 26 readership 2 “realistic” modes, fiction 15 Reardon, Bryan P. 206

Index reciprocal conception 47 religion: Divine love 33–4; elements 31–2; material culture 32; messiah fgure 171; mystery religion 32, 33, 69, 171, 212, 216; Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic philosophy 32; as ritual 29, 32, 33, 142, 181;romantic love 33; supernatural events 32 Rhode, Erwin 1 Ricoeur, Paul 5, 13, 14, 42 Risus festival 244 Romance’s human-god hero, career 21, 21 Roman love elegy 46 Round Table 17 Sallust (Metamorphosis) 169, 251 Sappho 149 Schmeling, Gareth L. 3, 44 Schwartz, Eduard 38 Schwartz, Saundra 109n26 Second Sophistic 4, 5, 7, 8, 41, 79, 97, 115, 116, 122, 127, 144, 168, 205, 209, 246 Selene 169, 176, 177, 214, 227n28 self-conception 146 Sextus Pompey 98–9 sexual identity 116 sexual violence 52 Shakespeare: As You Like It 26 Sicilian expedition 96 Sisimithres 195–6 slaves and slavery 36, 41, 46, 47, 81, 88, 91, 94, 100, 106, 125, 133, 150–2, 156, 165, 217, 237, 245, 250 Smith, Steven D. 95, 100 social formations 40–1 social relationships 15 Socratic psychagogia 173 Sostratus (Leukippe’s father) 122 soul-warping urban sexual hierarchies 155 Spengler 14, 16 Spenser, Edmund 25 spiritual symbiosis 9, 48 Stadter, Philip A. 87 Stoa Poikile 35, 237–8 Stoicism 35, 57 story of Sinuhe 189, 190 sublime 2, 4–7, 22, 36, 38, 44, 65, 69, 115, 119, 129, 133, 134, 136, 155, 268 Swain (Hellenism) 39 Syene 166–8, 171, 191, 192 symbolic/semiotic systems 63

315

Symposium 170–1, 190, 246 Syracusan society 68; idealization of 87 Syrinx myth 121, 126, 127, 139 Telemachus 10 Telemachy 137 Telepinus myth 30 Theagenes 37, 24, 162, 164, 171, 172, 180–4, 191, 194, 195 Thelyphron (Apuleius) 230, 231, 236, 242–4, 252 Thersandros (Achilles Tatius) 25, 32, 206, 213–18, 220, 223, 224 Thiasus 248, 252 Thisbe (Heliodorus) 23, 163, 164, 174, 175, 183 Thrasyleon 245 Thucydides 5 Thyamis 17, 40, 56, 165, 168, 171, 174, 177, 183, 210, 215, 224 Trachinus (Heliodorus) 173, 175, 177, 183 Transcendence 55, 136 transgressive emotions 56 transgressive Methymnaean youths 118 traumas, identity formation 63–4 trial scenes 144, 191, 221 truth vs. fction 5 unharmonized love 132 Venus 26, 30, 45, 128, 240, 246, 247, 252, 253, 256 Vespasian 7–8 Vinaver, Eugène 19 Weber, Max 39 Whitmarsh, Tim 4, 10, 134–5, 172 Winkler, John J. 115, 127, 137, 230, 256 witches 240, 250 Women: Aithiopika 62; companionate conception 47; Concordia/Homonoia 47; confned and isolated 52; desire dimensions 56–7; Epicureanism 57; erasure 52, 132–4; family life 46, 53–4; and forms 69; gender issues 54–5; Greek New Comedy 45; idealized female 51–3; marriage life 46; mythology 58; novel as rhetorical echo chamber 46; parental/social authority 45–6; personal growth 45; Phaedrus 61; phantasia 60; physical violations 59; physical virginity 58; Plutarch (see

316 Index Plutarch); political evolution 44–5; pothos 61; psychoanalytic theory 59; reciprocal conception 47; Roman love elegy 46; self-control 47; Stoicism 57; transcendence 55 Wonders Beyond Thule (Antonius) 24

Xenophon of Athens 38, 47 Xenophon of Ephesus 4, 9, 17, 18, 19, 26, 29, 32, 35, 40, 53, 65, 171 Zeitlin, Froma I 227n32, 267 Žižek, Slavoj 6