Chariton’s novel is, to understate the case, a very competent piece of work, with a complex but coherently constructed plot, well-developed and consistent characterization, a clear and elegant prose style (based on that of the Athenian Xenophon), and a densely intertextual literary texture. The Ephesiaka (Ephesian Story) of Xenophon of Ephesus bears certain similarities of plot: its aristocratic and beautiful protagonists, Anthia and Habrocomes, fall in love and are married near the beginning of the novel, only to be separated as a result of a pirate attack and to undergo a series of brushes with death, encounters with lustful love-rivals (of both sexes), and extensive and aimless travel, before being reunited and living happily ever after in a passionate marriage in their Greek city. However, it leaves a very different impression: the plot is a hectic succession of loosely connected episodes rather than anything intricate and unified; many of the episodes are short, almost in note-form, and are abandoned before being developed; the invention stretches credibility to breaking point; characterization is rudimentary, and actions, particularly journeys, are often arbitrary and unmotivated, staged as a series of near misses before hero and heroine are eventually reunited; and the prose style is formulaic and unrefined, rarely going beyond the barest statement of what happened. In a word, it is unsophisticated, less clearly connected with the sophistic movement.
There are three broad ways in which these qualities can be explained and the novel interpreted. The first is to see it as an epitomized version of a more satisfactory original. Our text of the novel is in five books, but the Suda’s entry for Xenophon of Ephesus mentions ten. Given the Suda’s unreliability and the frequency with which numerals are corrupted in the transmission of texts, this is not compelling evidence for abridgement. However, the oddities, unevennesses, ellipses, and missed opportunities for elaboration in the narrative are more worrying. The attempt by Bürger (1892) to identify places where epitomization occurred has been vigorously attacked, notably by Hägg (1966), but the criticisms, if accepted, demonstrate only that Bürger’s precision in individual cases was misplaced: they do not disprove the epitome theory in principle.
The second and third approaches both assume that the text is, more or less, in its intended form. On the one hand, it may be that we are dealing with a subliterary text, composed for an implicitly less literate and sophisticated audience, one more interested in rapid and sensational incident than in subtler literary effects.19 A variant of this idea is that the novel was composed orally and written down only later, or that, if composed in writing, it remains close to oral roots.20 This would take the novel outside the sophistic ambit, but several considerations tell against the idea. Although our text lacks verbal allusion, it is in structural dialogue with the Odyssey. An embroidered canopy on the protagonists’ marriage bed (Ephesiaka 1.8.2–3) figures the story of Aphrodite and Ares as narrated by Demodocus, while the night after their reunion (5.14) is dominated by reciprocal storytelling, on the model of Odysseus’s reunion with Penelope, so framing the story in two nights of love, which act as markers of a progression from a purely sexual passion gratification to a mutual interaction at a non-physical level.21 This scheme further suggests an awareness of the Platonic hierarchy of kinds of Eros, and there are Platonic hints throughout the story. Xenophon of Ephesus is one of several Xenophons noticed in the Suda who appear to be novelists. It is a reasonable assumption that they were using pseudonyms to align themselves with Xenophon of Athens, whose Cyropedia might be seen as the prototypical novel. In fact, the names of the protagonists of our novel, Anthia and Habrocomes, are an unmistakable calque on those of the erotic subplot of the Cyropedia, Panthea and Abradatas.22 These factors suggest that author and intended readership both possessed a higher level of literary intelligence than is obvious in the surviving text. Furthermore, we do have a few papyrus fragments of “subliterary” fiction, but they do not look much like the Ephesiaka, featuring scenes of explicit sex, sensational violence, and the supernatural, rather than anything so clearly akin to the other “ideal” romances. Finally, the Ephesiaka sits neatly in the romantic tradition. Although the priority is difficult to determine, there are similarities between this novel and Callirhoe close enough to suggest that one author was imitating the other.23 And significantly Heliodorus, the most literary of all the novelists, clearly alludes to the Ephesiaka on several occasions, which would be unlikely if the novel truly were without any cultural pretension.
On the other hand, it may be that the Ephesiaka is the work of a sophisticated author, writing with deliberate simplicity (apheleia) for artistic effect.24 The problem is to understand exactly what that effect might be. Simplicity and sweetness of prose style were certainly valued by ancient rhetoricians, but Xenophon’s prose is simply lacking in any style. In any case, absence of stylistic pretension does not entail shoddiness of plot construction, and it is hard to see how a reader’s pleasure and excitement could be increased by the failure to develop interesting situations that characterizes so many of Xenophon’s episodes. At the same time, there is nothing in the text to suggest a parody of subliterary writing designed to offer superior amusement to a highly literate readership. A comparison with Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe is illuminating: there, artistic simplicity is part of a complex system of signification quite different from what we have in Xenophon.
Although the view is unfashionable and the question far from closed, it seems to me that the best explanation for the sheer oddness of this text is still that we do not have it as it was meant to be. With this proviso, and its implication that much of the sophisticated detail has been lost, it is nonetheless clear that Xenophon shared Chariton’s concern with elite identity, although he handled it in a very different way. Like Chariton’s, his protagonists come from the highest echelons of Greek polis-society, suffer a series of displacements which enable them to discover who they truly are, and eventually return to a stable marriage in the Greek center where they began. Whereas Chariton makes some play with the child of Chaereas and Callirhoe, whom Dionysius will eventually send back to Syracuse, so ensuring the propagation of the elite family, at the end of Xenophon’s novel the happy future into which the protagonists retire consists solely of the pleasure of being with one another, with no reference to children. However, their love is from the start a matter of civic interest, implying a similar anxiety about the continuity and stability of elite society lurking behind the erotic themes.
The absence of children is connected with temporal setting. Chariton in effect supplies a pedigree connecting the elite with the historical past so heavily validated by sophistic culture, but Xenophon does not exploit the past to stage his story or connect it to his readers. Rome is not named, but the official figures encountered by the protagonists reflect the realities of the Roman Empire.25 Perilaus (Xenophon’s version of Dionysius perhaps) is introduced as “the man in charge of the peace in Cilicia” (2.13.3), and later is said to “have been appointed to rule the peace in Cilicia” (3.9.5). These phrases are rightly understood as literary periphrases for the office of eirenarch, which is first attested epigraphically for the year 116–117, but may have existed considerably earlier than that date; attestations continue to the fifth century. The powers of the eirenarch varied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but Perliaus’s activities in the novel—essentially leading police operations against criminal gangs from a base in Tarsus—are not seriously out of keeping with what we find for instance in martyrologies. Similarly, Habrocomes appears before an anonymous “archon of Egypt” (4.2.1). This term is frequently used of Roman governors, and the responsibilities of this man, who acts as judge in capital cases and commands troops within his province, again reflect Roman realities. These details suggest a vaguely contemporary setting, but since they concern long-term institutions they do not help to date the composition or setting of the novel precisely. A passing reference (3.12.2) to “shepherds” (poimenes) operating as bandits in the Nile Delta seems to be connected with the Boukoloi, whose uprising in 171 attra
cted some attention and is reflected in Achilles Tatius. As with Chariton, there is no compelling evidence for an early dating: my belief is that the original version of the novel appeared in the mid-second century, well within the world of the Second Sophistic.
Again unlike Chariton, Xenophon is not in the business of defining Greekness against a barbarian “other.” Although his plot is Hellenocentric in that its heroes begin from and return to a major Greek city, in this case Ephesus, its geography does not deal in sustained ethnic polarities. The heroes’ travels are extensive and varied, but do not take them beyond the boundaries of the Greco-Roman world into barbarian territory. Within those limits they do encounter individuals who are described as “barbarian.” The most exotic of these is a colorless Indian ruler called Psammis, who purchases Anthia from pirates in Alexandria, but is soon killed and robbed of her near Coptus. Apart from the fact that he is superstitious—a quality the narrator says is characteristic of “barbarians” (3.11.4) but which is primarily a narratorial device to motivate his refraining from raping the heroine whom he believes to be a priestess of Isis—Psammis is not characterized at all. Otherwise, the most prominent “barbarian” is Manto, the daughter of the Tyrian pirate-chief Apsyrtus, who has captured Habrocomes and Anthia.26 She desires Habrocomes, threatens violence if he does not comply, falsely accuses him to her father of attempted rape, and, after her marriage to a Syrian from Antioch, sends Anthia off to be the wife of a goatherd, who is later ordered to kill her. A little barbarian coloring is useful here to emphasize and condemn Manto’s uncontrolled sexuality and cruelty, but she lives and operates within the Hellenic world.27 Her doublet, the spectacularly evil Cyno—who within a single chapter (3.12) conceives a foul desire for Habrocomes, wears down his chaste resolve and kills her aged husband to clear the path to her bed for him, and then, when he cannot bring himself to sleep with a murderess, falsely accuses him of the crime—is not characterized as “barbarian,” despite living in Egypt (but this whole episode looks to be the victim of the epitomator).
Ultimately what matters in Xenophon’s world is not the difference between Greek and non-Greek, but that between elite and non-elite status. The protagonists come from the highest levels of Ephesian society, and Habrocomes at least is characterized by a vague but class-defining paideia (1.1.2), which encompasses the arts (mousikê poikilê), and training (gymnasmata) in hunting, horsemanship, and sword-fighting. In one episode, Chariton explores the nightmare of total loss of social status, when Chaereas and Polycharmus are enslaved and work in a chain gang, but Xenophon exposes his heroes again and again to threats of enslavement and the consequent loss of control over their own bodies. Their travels, in short, take them not to alien lands but beyond the margins of respectable society, and the resolution of the plot involves not only return home but reemergence from the underclass.
The pattern begins when they are captured by a pair of pirates, Corymbus and Euxinus, who fall in love with them and so pose the first threat to the integrity of their bodies and their relationship. The threat is averted only when the pirate-leader, Apsyrtus, claims them as his own slaves. Habrocomes is enslaved for a second time when the ship he is traveling in is wrecked off the Nile Delta, he is captured by the “shepherds,” and sold to an elderly soldier called Araxus (3.12). He is subjected to a series of unwanted sexual attentions from social inferiors who temporarily have control of him: the homosexual pirate Corymbus, Apsyrtus’s barbarian daughter Manto, and Araxus’s hideous wife Cyno. He is twice imprisoned (on charges of attempted rape and murder, following accusations by Manto and Cyno). In Sicily he lives with a subsistence-level fisherman, Aegialeus (who keeps his wife’s body in the house), and ends up taking a job as a labourer in the stone quarries of Nuceria (5.8.1–3).
Anthia’s tale of social degradation is even more horrifying. After being enslaved to Apsyrtus, she is gifted to Manto as a wedding present, and sent away by her jealous mistress to be the wife of an extra-societal goatherd, who later sells her to Cilician merchants. When they are shipwrecked she is captured by a gang of bandits led by Hippothous, but rescued by the eirenarch Perilaus, who, inevitably, falls in love with her. She tries to kill herself to escape marriage, is buried and revives in the tomb, which is looted by robbers who sell her to a slave dealer in Alexandria (3.9.1ff.). This is where she is bought by Psammis, only to be captured again by Hippothous: when she kills one of his men who tries to rape her, she is shut up in a trench with big dogs, but preserved by another amorous brigand. Eventually, she falls into the hands of a relation of the governor of Egypt, Polyidus, whose jealous wife cuts off her hair and ships her to Tarentum in Italy to be sold to a brothel keeper. She is there at the same time that Habrocomes is quarrying stone: both have sunk as low in society as it is possible to sink, from the relative security and dignity of domestic service to the most demeaning manual labor and sex work. Like Habrocomes, she is assailed by unwelcome lovers, often powerful men, whose position gives them power over her: the pirate Euxinus, the eirenarch Perilaus, the Indian princeling Psammis, the bandits Anchialus and Amphinomus, the commander Polyidus, and finally the clients in the Tarentine brothel (whom she deters by feigning epilepsy). Only the humble goatherd treats her with respect.
For both the protagonists then, the breathless plot is a walk on the wild side of the world of the Second Sophistic, a nightmarish rehearsal of what it might mean to lose social status and everything that goes with it: comfort, leisure, culture, and, most importantly, physical and moral security and control of one’s own person. In an extreme form, the story inscribes the real anxieties of the Greek elite in the imperial period, and defines their identity by a set of social antitheses. In that sense, Xenophon is playing closer to the edge than Chariton, whose negotiation of identity remains bookish and rooted in a past that can be regained through literary activity.
Like Chariton’s, this novel has an important third character, who embodies the central theme. This is the robber Hippothous, who twice captures Anthia without recognizing her and, still without recognizing her, falls in love with her and buys her from the brothel keeper, and also befriends Habrocomes as he searches for Anthia in Cilicia. He acts as a girder to connect the novel’s two narrative strands, and eventually is instrumental in reuniting the two protagonists. At one point (3.2), he tells Habrocomes his life story, revealing that he too is by origin a member of the social elite, from the city of Perinthus, who took to banditry after killing a love rival and then losing his boyfriend in a shipwreck; the homosexuality (something completely absent from Chariton’s world) passes almost without comment, but is probably not, at this stage, the same as classical Athenian pederasty, since Hippothous and his beloved were of the same age and so did not arouse suspicion.28 After serving in the ranks of a bandit gang, Hippothous’s social quality showed, and he graduated to running his own bandit gang, operating successively in Cilicia, Cappadocia, Syria, Phoenicia, and Egypt. When his band is destroyed by Polyidus, he escapes to Sicily. Here he is able to regain respectability by marrying, reluctantly, a wealthy widow, who promptly dies, leaving him the wherewithal to live in comfort with an aristocratic youth named Cleisthenes. This looks more like the classical model of older erastês and younger erômenos, but at the end of the novel the relationship mutates by adoption into one of father and son, so that Hippothous also is able to ensure elite familial continuity. His story hovers around the margins of society, and dramatizes the anxieties of how life might be lived outside the elite.
Both of these novels, then, speak to the Second Sophistic concern with elite identity, but pose the question in different ways. In effect Chariton asks, “What does it mean to be Greek?,” and Xenophon, “What does it mean to be a member of the elite?” Both explore the question by constructing antitheses for their protagonists. But their different strategies derive from diametrically different attitudes toward the defining fact of the imperial period. Chariton’s anxiety over Greek identity was given its edge by the power of Rome, which called Greeknes
s into question and prompted a flight to a world from which Rome was excluded, though present in its absence. Xenophon, on the other hand, seems to take the Roman settlement for granted, although Rome is never mentioned by name, and to be more concerned with how elite life can continue under it.
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 64