The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  FURTHER READING

  Translations of these two novels can be found in Reardon 1989 (Chariton by B. P. Reardon and Xenophon by Graham Anderson), and Trzaskoma 2010. For basic information about them, the essays in Schmeling 1996 (by B. P. Reardon and Bernhard Kytzler) are still valuable. For the issues of identity on which this chapter concentrates, Whitmarsh 2011 is full of provocative insights, and Jones 2012 is particularly valuable on the role of paideia in the novels. For general literary assessment, the relevant sections of Hägg 1983 and Holzberg 1995 are standard introductions, and important essays on Chariton by Reardon and Hägg are reprinted in Swain 1999. Tilg 2010 concentrates on Chariton’s position in the development of the genre, and contains a wealth of background material, particularly on dating and possible relationships with Rome. For Chariton’s connection with history, Hunter 1994 is fundamental; Smith 2007 is tendentious and provocative. Xenophon is less well served bibliographically. Schmeling 1980 provides a basic introduction, and O’Sullivan 1995, in arguing the case for oral composition, offers many insights into Xenophon’s literary techniques.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bowie, E. L. 2002. “The Chronology of the Earlier Greek Novels since B. E. Perry: Revisions and Precisions.” Ancient Narrative 2: 47–63.

  Bürger, K. 1892. “Zu Xenophon von Ephesos.” Hermes 27: 36–67.

  Capra, A. 2009. “The (Un)happy Romance of Curleo and Liliet: Xenophon of Ephesus, the Cyropedia and the Birth of the Anti-tragic Novel.” Ancient Narrative 9: 29–50.

  Crawford, D. S. 1955. Papyri Michaelidae. Aberdeen.

  De Temmerman, K. 2014. Crafting Characters: Heroes and Heroines in the Ancient Greek Novel. Oxford.

  Doulamis, K. 2007. “Stoic Echoes and Style in Xenophon of Ephesus.” In Philosophical Presences in the Ancient Novel, edited by J. R. Morgan and M. Jones, 151–176. Groningen.

  Doulamis, K. 2011. “Forensic Oratory and Rhetorical Theory in Chariton Book 5.” In Echoing Narratives: Studies of Intertextuality in Greek and Roman Prose Fiction, edited by K. Doulamis, 21–48. Ancient Narrative Supplementum 13. Groningen.

  Foucault, M. 1984. Le Souci de Soi. Paris.

  Hägg, T. 1966. “Die Ephesiaka des Xenophon Ephesios: Original oder Epitome?” C&M 27: 118–161. Translated as “The Ephesiaca of Xenophon Ephesius: Original or Epitome?” in Hägg, Parthenope: Selected Studies in Ancient Greek Fiction (1969–2004), edited by L. B. Mortensen and T. Eide, 159–198, Copenhagen, 2004.

  Hägg, T. 1983. The Novel in Antiquity. Berkeley, CA.

  Hägg, T. 1987. “Callirhoe and Parthenope: The Beginnings of the Historical Novel.” Cl. Ant. 6: 184–204. Reprinted in Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, edited by S. Swain, 137–160, Oxford, 1999; and in Hägg, Parthenope: Selected Studies in Ancient Greek Fiction (1969–2004), edited by L. B. Mortensen and T. Eide, 73–98, Copenhagen, 2004.

  Hägg, T. 2004. Parthenope: Selected Studies in Ancient Greek Fiction (1969–2004). Edited by L. B. Mortensen and T. Eide. Copenhagen.

  Hansen, W., ed. 1998. Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature. Bloomington, IN.

  Hernández Lara, C. 1990. “Rhetorical aspects of Chariton of Aphrodisias.” Giornale Italiano di Filologia 42: 267–274.

  Holzberg, N. 1995. The Ancient Novel: An Introduction. London and New York.

  Hunter, R. 1994. “History and Historicity in the Romance of Chariton.” ANRW 2.34.2: 1055–1086.

  Jones, C. P. 1992. “La personnalité de Chariton.” In Le monde du roman grec, edited by M.-F. Baslez, P. Hoffmann, and M. Trédé, 161–167. Paris.

  Jones, M. 2012. Playing the Man: Performing Masculinities in the Ancient Greek Novel. Oxford.

  Konstan, D. 1994. Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. Princeton, NJ.

  Morgan, J. R. 2004. “Chariton.” In Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by I. J. F. De Jong, R. Nünlist, and A. Bowie, 479–487. Leiden.

  Morgan, J. R. 2007. “Travel in the Greek Novels: Function and Interpretation.” In Travel, Geography and Culture in Ancient Greece, Egypt and the Near East, edited by C. Adams and J. Roy, 139–160. Oxford.

  Morgan, J. R. 2008. “Intertextuality: 1, The Greek Novel.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh, 218–227. Cambridge.

  O’Sullivan, J. N. 1995. Xenophon of Ephesus: His Compositional Technique and the Birth of the Novel. Berlin and New York.

  Papanikolaou, A. D. 1973. Chariton-Studien: Untersuchungen zur Sprache und Chronologie der griechischen Romane. Göttingen.

  Perry, B. E. 1967. The Ancient Romances: A Literary-Historical Account of Their Origins. Berkeley, CA, and London.

  Reardon, B. P., ed. 1989. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Berkeley, CA.

  Reardon, B. P. 1996. “Chariton.” In The Novel in the Ancient World, edited by G. Schmeling, 309–335. Leiden.

  Rife, J. L. 2002. “Officials of the Roman Provinces in Xenophon’s Ephesiaca.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 138: 93–108.

  Ruiz-Montero, C. 1991. “Aspects of the Vocabulary of Chariton of Aphrodisias.” CQ 41: 484–489.

  Schmeling, G. 1980. Xenophon of Ephesus. Boston.

  Schmeling, G., ed. 1996. The Novel in the Ancient World. Leiden.

  Schwartz, S. 2003. “Rome in the Greek Novel? Images and Ideas of Empire in Chariton’s Persia.” Arethusa 36: 375–394.

  Smith, S. D. 2007. Greek Identity and the Athenian Past in Chariton: The Romance of Empire. Groningen.

  Swain, S., ed. 1999. Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel. Oxford.

  Tagliabue, A. 2013. “The Ephesiaca as a Bildungsroman.” Ancient Narrative 10: 17–46.

  Tilg, S. 2010. Chariton of Aphrodisias and the Invention of the Greek Love Novel. Oxford.

  Trzaskoma, S. 2010. Two Novels from Ancient Greece. Callirhoe and Ephesian Story. Indianapolis, IN, and Cambridge.

  Whitmarsh, T. 2011. Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance. Cambridge.

  CHAPTER 26

  LONGUS AND ACHILLES TATIUS

  FROMA ZEITLIN

  VERY little is known about the authors, Longus and Achilles Tatius, whose prose fiction is the subject of this chapter; and what we think we know is not even very reliable either. Epigraphical sources suggest a provenance of Lesbos for the name Longus, although his native knowledge of that Greek island, the setting of his Daphnis and Chloe (D&C), is open to some dispute.1 Even more disconcerting, Longus (Loggos) may not even be a proper name, but a misreading (or misspelling) of logos (story) in the manuscripts. With Achilles Tatius, we may seem to be on firmer ground, given the biographical entry in the Suda (despite certain confusions about his name). Yet even in this instance, his Alexandrian origins may derive merely from his elaborate ekphrasis of that city in book 5 of Leucippe and Cleitophon (L&C).2 When it comes to chronology, however, even in the absence of hard evidence, we may feel more somewhat more confident in attributing both authors to the period of the so-called Second Sophistic, dated to somewhere (probably late) in the second century CE, when Greek Hellenism under Rome (with its emphasis on paideia and an awareness of its own belatedness in respect of its classical inheritance) was at its height.3 Along with the later Aithiopika of Heliodorus (third to fourth centuries CE) these three novels, by reason of their sophisticated literary techniques, stylistic complexity, debts to the rhetorical schools, erudite uses of myths, aesthetic connoisseurship, and self-conscious artistry differ from those of their more straightforward predecessors (Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus), which are thought to belong either to the late Hellenistic period or that of the early empire.4

  Nevertheless, for all these distinctions, the five extant romances share variations on conventional plots that depict a young (elite) couple who fall in love but undergo a number of vicissitudes and delays, until the novel reaches its expected conclusion, that is, the happy ending in the accomplishment (or as in the case of Chariton and Xenophon, the renewal) of a marriage that is sanctioned by fam
ily and society, with the gods’ approval. While the identity of the genre itself is barely acknowledged in ancient sources, and concomitantly, we have only a few clues to the composition of its readership (which might even have included women as well as men), the stylistics of Longus and Achilles Tatius (and Heliodorus) were surely meant for a highly educated audience, which could appreciate the literary and aesthetic merits of these erotic works and whose readers could apply their own interpretive skills to intertextual games of multiple allusions, undercurrents of irony, and clever manipulations of familiar topoi for pleasure as for profit.

  This said, however, the pairing of D&C and L&C for this chapter might seem like a mating of strange bedfellows. After all, Longus’s tale (often dubbed a pastoral romance, but with a turn to New Comedy in the last episodes) is a small-scale miniature consisting of four books, set entirely in an idyllic landscape (a locus amoenus) on the island of Lesbos, where the young lovers enjoy a condition of unimaginable innocence and what adventures they have are limited to their own surroundings. Exposed at birth, the two youngsters of unknown parentage, adopted by rustic folk, grow up in the countryside, where, with a disarmingly faux simplicity, they learn to be shepherds and goatherds, make garlands, play panpipes, join in the vintage, catch birds, and romp on the mountains and seashore, according to the seasons. They fall in love as they begin to mature, but distressed by their mysterious symptoms, they do not know at first that it is love (Eros) that ails them, and once informed by an older shepherd (Philetas), they are still ignorant of how to achieve the physical satisfaction of their desire. The fourth and last book, with the arrival of the city folk and the master of the domain, Dionysophanes, turns to the genre of New Comedy, with its obligatory recognition scenes that culminate in a final legitimation of the protagonists’ identity as offspring of well-born parents, a move that in this socially conscious world of elites is essential to complete (and validate) the happy ending. Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Cleitophon, by contrast, is a sprawling tale of maximum complexity that covers the length of eight books. It involves a wide-ranging geography, features a number of paradoxographical excurses along with sophistic debates and heavy emotional outpourings, and, in general, encompasses a much broader range of experience. Aside from leading the well-born lovers through the requisite journeys, shipwrecks, disasters, and separations that take place all around the Mediterranean (to include Byzantium, Tyre, Alexandria, and Ephesus), the text parades its scientific and philosophical learning at every opportunity (e.g., aetiologies of wine and the color purple, love life of plants and animals, habits of the phoenix, the river Nile). Its narrative, replete with numerous sententiae, along with its complex, even baroque, plot and multiple characters, suggests a knowing outlook on life, not without a cynical (and to some, a parodistic) touch on more than one occasion.5 Longus focuses throughout on a single couple, Daphnis and Chloe, with subsidiary would-be rustic suitors for Chloe in the first and last books (Dorkon, Lampis), who may leave an essential imprint on the plot, but are soon enough dispatched. Daphnis too is subject to unwanted sexual advances, this time by Gnathon, the urban pederast, who in the last book accompanies the master, Dionyophanes and his son Astylos, to this country estate. But his short-lived scheme to take Daphnis back to the city for his own debauched pleasures is the very crisis that speedily precipitates the final dénouement. Achilles Tatius, by contrast, delights in erotic complications with a network of crisscrossing amorous figures, either on the brink of matrimony or already married: Leucippe and Cleitophon, the impetuous lovers, are the center of interest, of course, but their lives intersect with two other major pairs (Calligone and Callisthenes; Melite and Thersandros) in several triangular combinations that immensely complicate the plot.6

  Yet a preliminary comparison of the two romances is an object lesson, as it were, in the flexibility of the genre itself, that is, the creative possibilities of using novelistic tropes and thematic conventions to produce entirely different results, while reinforcing (if, at times, challenging) the ideological underpinnings of the ideal romance. Hence before venturing further, let us look at them, as one critic has said, in counterpoint.7

  PARALLELS AND INVERSIONS

  Longus and Achilles Tatius, each in his own way, performs a remarkable experiment that transforms a romantic story into a sort of test site for approaching theoretical questions about perception and cognition through the focalizing lens of eros, whose desiring eye and all-consuming passion serve as chief stimuli for acquiring knowledge about the world, in both its physical and emotional aspects. Structurally speaking, both works begin with the accidental viewing of an erotic painting as a framing device (the picture in the sacred grove in Longus, that of Zeus’s abduction of Europa in Achilles Tatius). The primary narrator in both is a tourist, who happens upon it (a hunter from the city in Lesbos for Longus; an unknown stranger who meets Cleitophon in Sidon as they both gaze at the picture). In each case, the erotic subject they see is the cue that sets the entire narrative in motion (Longus: a historia Erôtos, as the narrator says; Achilles Tatius: the figure of Eros depicted in the painting of Europa). The lure of the visual, in fact, pervades both works in which extended ekphrastic discourse is a recurrent narrative trope. Although Achilles offers ekphrases of four paintings (to Longus’s one), in keeping with the scopophiliac tendencies of the narrator,8 each author favors descriptions of gardens, with all their erotic symbolic potential, not once but twice in their respective texts (Longus in strategically placed accounts in books 2 and 4 [the garden of Philetas, the paradeisos of Dionysophanes]; Achilles in the first book in a trompe l’œil effect that slides from the painting to a grove to an actual garden as the scene of seduction in book 1).9

  Each is preoccupied with the origins and nature of Eros, both heterosexual and homosexual; both adduce Platonic ideas in one form or another, especially from the Phaedrus and the Symposium,10 and both feature two appearances of an erotic teacher, a praeceptor amoris, one male, one female, who provides indoctrination into the mechanics and metaphysics of sexual pleasure (the pastoral figure of Philetas in book 2 and the city woman, Lycaenion, in book 3 for Longus; Cleinias, Cleitophon’s friend cousin in book 1, and Melite, the Ephesian widow, in book 5, for Achilles).11 At the same time, both texts tease the reader to different degrees with the possibility of higher aspirations in quasi-serious allusions to carnal love as a spiritual mystic initiation under the guidance of the gods (Longus: Eros, then Dionysus; Achilles: Aphrodite and Eros).12

  Broadly speaking, each charts its plot as an éducation sentimentale of sorts for male and female alike, with the requisite amorous rivals, acts of sexual aggression, erotic temptations, and near tragic outcomes, although the couple’s maturation through time and experience is obviously treated in quite different ways. Longus’s tale follows a straightforward narrative account from birth to marriage, in tune with the changing of the seasons, and the progress of their activities treats Eros itself as a spontaneous and organic process.13 In Achilles Tatius, the main characters, already on the threshold of adulthood, fumble their way through a number of vicissitudes, starting with their impulsive elopement after a failed seduction, followed by shipwreck and abductions that lead to subsequent violent separations and a series of ordeals, before earning the approval of their union at the end. Both works, of course, end in the predictable success of a reciprocal love that is sanctioned by family and society through legitimate matrimony, with a (genre-specific) rejection of any pederastic alternative along the way (Longus: Gnathon; Achilles: Cleinias, Menelaus). Above all, however, in striking contrast to the earlier romances, marriage is the endpoint of the novel, not its beginning, a situation which suggests a more evolutionary model of love’s requirements.14

  Central to this chronological shift is a new emphasis on virginity. In both novels the willing acquiescence of the girl threatens to sabotage the requisite demand for premarital chastity: Chloe by reason of her innocent desire to alleviate the erotic symptoms that torment her; Leucippe,
persuaded to acquiesce through Cleitophon’s seductive advances. Hence, the maintenance of the genre’s (and society’s) inflexible rules against a premature sexual union of the couple constitutes the narrative suspense that energizes the plot until its conclusion in successful consummation. This is, in fact, the single feature that most distinguishes these sophistic texts from their predecessors, in which the protagonists are already wedded to one another before the “adventure time” of the romance begins, and their plots consist, not in the maintenance of physical chastity itself, but in the constancy of their commitment to one another throughout all the trials of separation, jealous rivals, threats of death, and other dangerous encounters.15 A first result of this change, while perhaps an indication of a changing emphasis on the symbolic value of virginity itself in the religious mix of later antiquity, is the notion that sexual initiation can be attained only as the result of transformative experiences in the development of the protagonists’ identities that includes a return to socially prescribed gendered roles. A second result may be just the opposite (or its corollary)—the titillation of teasing foreplay that is sustained throughout the divagations of the plot, for characters and readers alike. That is, both sophistic narratives continually work the double game of deflecting and also refracting sexual tensions into other forms of activity, descriptions, similes, and so on, that serve to eroticize the entire environment (panta erotica, as Longus’s narrator describes the painting he sees). The continual postponement of physical satisfaction gives rise to a text that prolongs the excitement through a variety of means that may often serve as distractions but more often are themselves drawn into the very erotic trap they are meant to evade, and we become aware of hidden analogies and metaphors, of actions and attitudes, that they are meant to repress (e.g., wolves, pirates, trampling of grapes, panpipes, or bird catching for Longus; e.g., bandits, daggers, hippopotami, urban mazes, for Achilles). Nevertheless, if the girl must remain in a virgin state, the hero, albeit for different reasons, has sex with another (more mature) woman with noteworthy results for the plot. For Longus, Lycaenion, the city woman, teaches the ignorant Daphnis the actual mechanics of sex (beyond Philetas’s earlier prescriptions in book 2), but warns him about the difference between maidens and women, lest he run off and try his new-found knowledge on Chloe. In the case of L&C, a wealthy widow, Melite, pursues Cleitophon with all the rhetorical skills at her disposal. She does achieve an eventual (if short-lived and untimely) success, despite the fact of their previously unconsummated “marriage” that took place in Alexandria after Leucippe was presumed dead, having been captured and apparently decapitated at sea by pirates (the second Scheintod) in book 5.